Full-time agent developer: the hardest part of AI agents isn't AI, it's failure paths and handoff
jakes_takes_ · reddit · 2026-10-02
A professional AI agent developer wrote a long Reddit post on the widening gap between online demos and real-world agent deployments, laying out a battle-tested playbook:
- The model is no longer the hard part — difficulty lives in data, failure behavior, and handoff. What you can demo in a week isn't production.
- Four feasibility checks before any project: runs at least a few times a week, inputs arrive in a consistent shape, steps fit on one page with no "it depends," and output correctness is verifiable same-day. Three "no"s means it's a process project, not an automation project.
- Build the failure path first: input validation that rejects malformed data instead of guessing, an explicit escape hatch that stops and tags a human rather than improvising, and full decision logs for 2am reconstruction. "The agent gets noticeably dumber and massively more useful."
- The described process is never the real process: sit with the person doing the work for an hour and ask what they do when things go weird.
- Scope: first build should be one step, high frequency, boring, verifiable by Friday. Big ambitious projects quietly die in six months and poison automation culture for years.
- Handoff or it doesn't count: if only one person can explain the system, you built a liability.
- Do the math before buying tools: hours spent × human cost — about half the time the answer is "leave the task alone."
His worst deployment scar: dirty input data pretending to be clean.
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