7 essential stages to make your agent production-ready
kmeanskaran · x · 2026-08-18
A widely shared engineering checklist for shipping agents to production, covering 7 stages:
1. Agent layer
- Prompt caching: cache system prompt + tools; nothing dynamic above the breakpoint
- Tool calling: versioned schemas, structured errors the model can recover from
- Rate limits: backoff + jitter, per-tenant token buckets, DLQ for the rest
- Memory: context first, then DynamoDB with TTL, then vector store; unbounded history is a bug
- Budgets: max steps/tokens/wall-clock — in code, not in the prompt
- Idempotency: retries are guaranteed; double charges shouldn't be
- Fail closed with human approval on irreversible actions
2. Orchestration
- One loop, one owner; nested agents are a debugging nightmare
- Sub-agents get their own context — pass a brief, not full history
- Fan out in parallel, join once; sequential sub-agents are just a slow loop
- Checkpoint every step for crash recovery
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