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Continuing the launch series. Our intro promised analysis for the people shipping agents. So let's open one up.
Every viral agent demo is the same: a model, a tool, a while loop. It works on stage. Then you try to ship it and discover the demo was 5% of the system.
The parts nobody demos
- The control loop — termination conditions, step budgets, and loop-detection so it doesn't spin forever burning tokens.
- Memory — what to keep, what to summarize, what to forget. Context windows are a budget, not a bucket.
- Tool I/O contracts — schema validation, retries, and graceful degradation when a tool 500s.
- Observability — traces of every thought, call, and result, or you will debug blind.
The model is the engine. Production is the chassis, brakes, and seatbelts.
The mindset shift
Stop thinking "prompt" and start thinking "policy." A production agent is a small distributed system that happens to have a language model as one (unreliable) component. Treat that component as fallible and design around it.
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Next: how to know your agent actually works — evals as the new unit tests.
More on the Meddler A.I. hub.
