Brains vs hands: Netflix Conductor creator on running AI agents safely in production
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-09
At AI Engineer World's Fair, Orkes co-founder/CTO Viren Baraiya (original creator of Netflix Conductor) explains running AI agents in production. Core idea: a clean split between brain and hands — the LLM plans what happens next; a deterministic, durable harness executes with approval gates, idempotent steps, and recorded side effects. He frames agent harnesses as late-bound sagas, argues agents are applications (not components) that run for months, and demos an SRE agent whose plan compiles into a Conductor workflow, executes, checks, and re-plans across two loops.
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