AI Agents That Actually Work: Patterns From Real Projects
I have spent the last eighteen months either building, reviewing, or operating systems that some marketing department somewhere has called “agents”. The definition has been so thoroughly stretched that it now means anything from a chatbot with a calculator tool to a long-running autonomous workflow that touches production infrastructure. Underneath the noise there is a real engineering discipline emerging, and the patterns that separate the systems that survive contact with real users from the ones that demo well and fall over are starting to be legible. ...