i built two langgraph projects and learned that agents are junior engineers with amnesia

i built two langgraph projects and learned that agents are junior engineers with amnesia

I've been a DevOps engineer for a while — 15 years in people management roles before that. lately I've been trying to figure out where AI fits into DevOps, not just running someone else's tool, but actually building agents myself.

LangGraph clicked for me because it maps to stuff I already know: DAGs, conditional branches, parallel stages, approval gates. it's basically a CI pipeline where some nodes happen to call an LLM instead of a shell script.

I built two projects back-to-back with it. different problems, same patterns. here's what I learned — including what broke.

the analogy that made it click