What we learned shipping AI agents to production
Agents are fun in a demo and humbling in production. Here are the guardrails that made ours reliable enough to trust.
Agents are fun in a demo and humbling in production. Here are the guardrails that made ours reliable enough to trust.
Function calling, agents, and MCP all rest on the same thing: tools an LLM can invoke. But a tool built for a non-deterministic, fallible caller needs different design than one built for code. A deep-dive on what makes a tool reliable for an LLM — naming, scope, validation, error messages it can recover from, and the safety that can't live in the model.
The most reliable AI systems in production aren't fully autonomous — they keep a human at the decision points that matter. But 'human in the loop' is easy to do badly: rubber-stamp approvals, alert fatigue, humans blamed for the model's mistakes. A deep-dive on designing the human-AI division of labour so both do what they're good at.
There are three ways to make an LLM do what your application needs — prompting, retrieval, and fine-tuning — and teams routinely reach for the wrong one. They solve different problems, and the costs differ enormously. A trend post on what each is actually for, and a decision order that saves you from over-engineering.
Function calling lets an LLM ask your code to run a function and use the result — turning a model that can only talk into one that can look things up and act. A deep-dive on how it actually works, why it's just structured output with a loop around it, and why you stay firmly in control of what actually runs.