What we learned building sandbox for document agent
Cross-posted from the Raycaster blog; I’ve spent the last several months building this, and here is my take. 2025 brought us the new idiom for building AI (beginning with Manus and Claude Code): give it tools to operate a computer. This is a break from the past default approach represented by ChatGPT, which is LLM + a menu of bespoke API connections to plug in to various systems of record. Our first attempt at a document agent was to ingest documents, parse them into plaintext pages, expose search/read/write tools, and let the LLM operate over virtual directories of artifacts and pages backed by a SQL database. ...