Designing production-grade agents: planning, tool-calling contracts, verification loops, memory boundaries, and escalation.

Agent design

Overview

A production agent is a controlled workflow runner, not a free-form chatbot. Design should emphasize explicit plans, strict tool contracts, verification steps, and safe defaults for side effects.

Key topics

  • Planning vs execution separation and explicit step criteria.
  • Tool-calling with JSON schemas and idempotency controls.
  • Verification: structural checks, business rules, and grounding checks.
  • Memory boundaries and retention policies.
  • Human escalation triggers and approval steps.

Common pitfalls

  • Letting the model invent tool parameters without validation.
  • Write actions without approvals or commit evidence.
  • Unbounded context and memory leading to drift and leakage.
  • No failure handling: retries cause duplicates and inconsistent state.

Recommended practices

  • Expose minimal tools for each role and workflow.
  • Make side effects explicit and replay-safe.
  • Use structured outputs for any action-ready result.
  • Instrument and evaluate workflows continuously.

This page is intended to be actionable for engineering teams. For platform-specific details, cross-reference /platform/agents, /platform/orchestration, and /platform/knowledge.