Production-Grade AI Agents: The Four Non-Negotiable Properties

Production-grade AI agents must ensure observability, bounded autonomy, graceful degradation, and auditability to survive real-world failures. The guide outlines five pillars: reliability via deterministic orchestration, security treating the agent as an insider threat, scalability with stateless orchestration, and observability through tracing and metrics. Without these, a system is just a prototype running in production.