Max Tkacz
The AI Agent Path to Prod: Building for Reliability
#1about 4 minutes
Why AI agents fail in production environments
AI agents often fail in production because the probabilistic nature of LLMs conflicts with the need for reliability at scale.
#2about 5 minutes
Scoping an AI agent for a specific business problem
Start by identifying a low-risk, high-impact task, like automating free trial extensions, to establish a viable solution scope.
#3about 3 minutes
Walking through the naive V1 customer support agent
The initial agent uses an LLM with tools to fetch user data and extend trials, but its reliability is unknown without testing.
#4about 4 minutes
Using evaluations to test the happy path case
Evaluations are introduced as a testing framework to run the agent against specific test cases, revealing inconsistencies even in the happy path.
#5about 4 minutes
Improving agent consistency with prompt engineering
By adding explicit rules and few-shot examples to the system prompt, the agent's tool usage and response quality become more consistent.
#6about 5 minutes
Testing for prompt injection and other edge cases
A new evaluation case for prompt injection reveals a security flaw, which is fixed by adding specific security rules to the system prompt.
#7about 6 minutes
Applying production guardrails beyond evaluations
Beyond evals, production readiness requires adding human-in-the-loop processes, custom error handling, rate limiting, and model redundancy.
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