Agentic Systems: Hype vs. Reality
After building three production agentic systems, here is what works and what is still science fiction.
After building three production agentic systems, here is what works and what is still science fiction.
The Setup
Every engineering decision starts with a context. In the last six months, I have shipped systems where the obvious answer turned out to be exactly wrong — and where the unintuitive choice quietly outperformed for months.
The Core Insight
What follows is not a rulebook. It is a list of failure modes I have walked into so you do not have to.
1. The Cheap Win
Most teams over-engineer the model and under-engineer the data pipeline. Reverse that ratio.
2. The Slow Win
The systems that win in production are the ones that fail gracefully — not the ones that have the lowest benchmark error.
More on this in the next post.