Five named agent patterns — and the nine control surfaces that decide whether each one is safe to ship.
Part 4 of 8 — AI Agents in Practice series.
Previous — How the Control Loop Actually Works (Part 3)
The damaged laptop
A TechNova customer writes in:
"My laptop arrived damaged. I want a refund."
State, stopping, and context — three engineering problems hiding inside five simple words.
Define what an agent actually is in engineering terms — a control loop with tools, state, and boundaries. The bridge from manual…
The AI Agents in Practice series. Learn how to build production-grade AI agents from first principles — why agent demos break,…
Watch now | The next serious agent failure won’t look like a jailbreak.
Idempotency, validation, budgets, and tracing — the checklist for shipping AI agents that actually survive production.
There's a pattern I kept seeing. A team gives an agent real capability, like moving money, shipping a...
