AI Engineering
Why Agent Pilots Die: A Playbook for Production Agents
Most AI agent pilots never reach production. This playbook gives a CTO the implementation patterns that do: orchestration, state and hand-offs, guardrails, evaluation, and cost control, with the failure modes that kill agent projects and how to design around them.
Most agent pilots die before production.
The gap between an impressive agent demo and a production system that earns its cost is where most projects fail. This playbook gives a CTO the orchestration patterns, guardrails, evaluation, and cost controls that get agents into production and keep them there.
What this whitepaper covers
- Orchestration patterns: sequential, parallel, and tree-based, in production terms.
- State, hand-offs, and the failure modes that break multi-step agents.
- Guardrails and human-in-the-loop gates for irreversible actions.
- Evaluation and cost control: keeping quality up and the token bill predictable.