The AI agent hype is real. Everyone wants to build autonomous systems that can write code, make decisions, and operate unsupervised. But here's the problem: most companies hiring for agent development are using the same outdated vetting criteria they used for regular software engineers.
And they're building garbage.
I've spent the last decade recruiting deep tech talent. Over the past year, I've watched the agent market explode. And I can tell you with absolute certainty: the bottleneck isn't finding people who understand LLMs. It's finding people who understand how to architect systems that actually work when the model is unreliable.
The Agent Problem Nobody Talks About
Building a production AI agent is fundamentally different from fine-tuning a model or writing prompt templates. Here's what separates the good builders from the rest:
