Author Archives: Jesse Liberty

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About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. Liberty is a Senior AI Engineer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and was a Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer for various corporations, a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a 21 year Microsoft MVP.

Creating a Spec Kit Extension

Want to build an extension to Spec Kit? This comprehensive guide walks you through everything you need: a ready-to-drop extension layout, a complete extension.yml manifest, a slash-command file, a lifecycle hook that runs a C# helper, a full C# console … Continue reading →

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Creating Spec Kit Presets Step-By-Step

This guide assumes you already understand what Spec Kit and presets are and focuses on the who/what/where/how of authoring, testing, and publishing a preset. The instructions are concrete and practical — including a minimal manifest example, the recommended folder layout, … Continue reading →

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4 Solutions to Spec Kit Issues

Your design docs look different across teams. Some repos forget the QA gate. Integrations (Jira, CI) are half-baked and duplicated as bash scripts. Onboarding a new engineer requires five manual steps to wire the same set of templates, commands, and … Continue reading →

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Prompts in MCP Servers

TL;DR Prompts allow you to manage the exact instructions your chat models receive and let apps pick those instructions at runtime. That’s the core value of “prompts” in the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP prompts let a server publish reusable, … Continue reading →

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When Is the LLM Called?

When working with agents (e.g., in Microsoft Agent Framework) it is easy to be confused as to when the LLM is called. Since calling the LLM (and getting responses) costs money (in the form of expended tokens) it is important … Continue reading →

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1,500 posts

So far, this blog has published 1,500 posts.

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MCP and Microsoft Agent Framework

tl;dr

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RAG in Microsoft Agent Framework Step By Step

Adding RAG to Microsoft Agent Framework is both straightforward and confusing. OK, that makes no sense, but I’ve been struggling to understand all the steps. Here’s a first approximation, more to come in future posts (and I have a video … Continue reading →

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Running Microsoft Agent Framework Locally

Run a full Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) agent entirely on-device to eliminate round trips to the cloud, reduce latency, avoid egress costs, and keep sensitive data private. With Foundry Local you can run optimized local model variants (ONNX/WinML) and wire … Continue reading →

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ChatClient v ResponsesClient in Microsoft Agent Framework

TL;DRUse the Responses client for new projects if you want the newest, richest hosted tools and structured outputs; use the Chat Completion client when you need maximum backward compatibility or are constrained to the Chat-completions API (for example, Go-only paths … Continue reading →

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Memory in BlogWriter

BlogWriter uses the Responses API which can help with state maintenance. BlogWriter, however, implements important state (context) using a session object, and manages long-term memory by writing to a Cosmos Database. I’m reusing this image because (a) it is apt … Continue reading →

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Copilot CLI

tl;drGitHub Copilot CLI is a terminal-native, agentic coding assistant that brings GitHub Copilot’s AI into your shell. Instead of only offering completions in an editor, Copilot CLI lets you ask natural-language questions, plan and execute multi-step tasks, edit files, run … Continue reading →

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