Cheat sheetAIS-04

Building & Orchestrating Agents

AI Specialization / Building & Orchestrating Agents

Production agents are an operations problem: orchestrate, gate, guard, evaluate, and observe — and make every failure graceful.

01
OrchestrationCoordinate work: single loop, prompt-chaining, routing, parallelization, or orchestrator-worker delegation.
02
HITL + guardrailsApproval gates before irreversible actions; input/output filters, allowed-tool lists, and validated schemas to block unsafe actions.
03
EvalsRepeatable, dataset-driven scoring of task success. Re-run on every change to catch regressions — not vibes.
04
ObservabilityTrace every step, tool call, token, latency, and cost so you can debug and monitor real behavior.
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Before shipping, wrap the agent: add a guardrail on inputs/outputs, a HITL gate on irreversible actions, tracing on every run, an eval set you re-run per change, and retries-with-fallback on external calls.

Bounded actionRefunds over 100 dollars pause for human approval; smaller ones auto-run — the agent proposes, a person confirms the risky ones.
Graceful failurePayments API times out -> retry twice with backoff -> fall back to opening a human ticket instead of guessing an outcome.
guardrail(input) -> agent -> guardrail(output)
if action.irreversible: require human approval
on tool error: retry+backoff -> fallback -> degrade gracefully
orchestrationguardrailshuman-in-the-loopevaluationobservabilitytracing
review in 6d