Most developers working with AI today can get a model to respond to a prompt.

A surprising few have shipped an agent that holds up in production.

The distance between those two points is where most agentic projects stall: frameworks that lock you into their abstractions, systems that behave like black boxes when something goes wrong, and an enterprise readiness bar that keeps moving every time a new requirement surfaces.

This was the problem Ashita Prasad, Developer Advocate at AWS, chose to address head-on at DevSparks Bengaluru 2026, across a two-hour hands-on workshop where 170 developers opened their laptops and built alongside her.

The session used Strands Agents, an open source SDK developed by AWS, taking participants from a basic agent all the way to one with guardrails, persistent memory, and observability built in.