Sales outreach agent postmortem: the model was easy, guardrails took months
TrainingOstrich657 · reddit · 2026-10-26
A developer shares hard-won engineering lessons from months building an agent that researches companies and sends email/LinkedIn outreach: only real human replies stop a sequence (catching curly apostrophes in 'don't contact me'); per-workflow review granularity; per-claim source citations verified server-side; retry when output is suspiciously thin; permissions in the database not the prompt (agents can only insert proposals); hard per-user/org spending caps before every paid call; written contracts for every generated text enforced by code; rate limits as a product feature.
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