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AI Agents

Agents are useful only when they are bounded by real workflows, explicit tools, and operational checks. The writing here treats agents as production systems, not autonomous magic.

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What Makes Agents Production-Ready

An agent is production-ready only when the system around it is boring:

  • Tool access is scoped and auditable.
  • Human approval exists where blast radius is high.
  • Outputs are validated before downstream actions.
  • Retries and fallbacks are explicit.
  • Cost and latency are measured per workflow, not per demo.

Reading Path

For orchestration decisions:

For architecture boundaries:

For governance and reliability:

Failure Modes

  • Giving an agent broad tool access before defining approval boundaries.
  • Treating orchestration as a prompt problem instead of a state-management problem.
  • Measuring success by task completion while ignoring retries, escalations, and silent failures.
  • Letting every team invent its own agent framework, logging format, and evaluation path.

References

    Why AI Agents Fail on Legacy Network Infrastructure Many AI agent failures trace to the network: stale DNS, flat trust, retry storms, shallow queues. Zero-trust identity and per-step reliability fix them. agents infrastructure security Local-First AI Agents: Why Cloud-Heavy Architecture Fails Agents that chain dozens of cloud hops pay in latency variance, cost, and failure surface. How to move routine inference local without a rewrite. agents infrastructure cost Building Reliable AI Agents in Go How I build reliable AI agents in Go: bounded tools, schema validation at the boundary, idempotent state, and a supervisor loop with hard limits. agents reliability ai AI Workflow Automation: Let the Model Decide, Let Code Act The trick to AI workflow automation is simple: let the model decide, let deterministic code act, and never confuse the two. devops ai agents Multi-Agent Orchestration: Four Patterns and Their Tradeoffs Multi-agent systems are distributed systems with the usual coordination headaches. The four patterns I've seen work, and when each one falls apart. agents ai architecture Model Context Protocol in Go: Building an MCP Tool Server I built a Model Context Protocol server in Go with mcp-go. The protocol layer is clean. Auth, permissions, and write safety are still on you. agents ai go AI Agent Patterns in Go: Planning, Memory, Recovery Single-prompt agents break on real tasks. Plan-execute-replan, orchestrated specialists, structured memory, and explicit recovery, with Go code. agents ai go Agentic Workflows in Production: Constrain the Blast Radius AI agents that take actions carry real blast radius. Policy allowlists, structured workflows, idempotent steps, tracing, and a shadow-mode rollout. agents ai production AI Agent Architecture Patterns for Production Agent demos impress. Production agents mostly don't. Planning, memory, least-privilege tool access, and evals: the systems design that decides what ships. ai agents llm Container Orchestration: Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Mesos Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos compared side by side at a mobility startup in late 2016. Kubernetes will win, but its operational tax is real. containers kubernetes agents