Production Agents Overview - Why 98% Haven't Deployed
Deep dive into why most agent deployments fail, the six capabilities tutorials skip, and how to build agents that survive production
production-agents Senior
Production Agents Deep Dive
Deep dive into why most agent deployments fail, the six capabilities tutorials skip, and how to build agents that survive production
9 articles
205 min total
Articles in this series
- 1
- 2
Idempotency & Safe Retries - The Stripe Pattern for Agents
Deep dive into idempotency: the single highest-leverage production requirement. Learn the Stripe pattern, error classification, jitter, and how to prevent cascading retry storms
- 3
State Persistence & Agent Memory - The Complete Domain
Deep dive into agent memory systems: working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, checkpointing patterns, context management, and long-running workflow persistence
- 4
Human-in-the-Loop Patterns - When Agents Need Judgment
Deep dive into HITL patterns for production agents: confidence-based routing, risk escalation, LangGraph interrupt, and avoiding the rubber-stamping problem at scale
- 5
Cost Control & Token Budgets - Preventing $10K Surprises
Deep dive into cost control for production agents: token budgets, circuit breakers, model routing, max step limits, and preventing runaway loops that burn through API credits
- 6
Observability & Silent Failures - Catching What Doesn't Crash
Deep dive into agent observability: intent drift detection, semantic failure monitoring, tool selection tracking, FinOps visibility, and the 5 intent threats every production agent faces
- 7
Durable Execution Frameworks - Don't Reinvent the Wheel
Deep dive into durable execution frameworks for agents: Temporal, Inngest, Restate, Azure Durable Functions, AWS Step Functions. When to use each and how they solve agent production challenges
- 8
Security & Sandboxing - Containing Agent Risk
Deep dive into agent security: prompt injection defense, tool permission boundaries, sandboxing levels, container hardening, and risk-appropriate isolation strategies
- 9
Testing & Evaluation - Validating Agent Behavior
Deep dive into agent testing: unit testing tools, integration testing flows, simulation-based testing, evaluation metrics, golden datasets, and handling non-deterministic behavior