r/AI_Agents: Production Builder Details the Unglamorous Infrastructure Work That Separates Agents That Survive Production From Those That Don't

A production agent builder on r/AI_Agents documents the infrastructure work that consumes most of their engineering time and rarely appears in demos: readable run logs, interruptible checkpoints with state persistence, structured error envelopes with retry logic, and per-step cost attribution. The post argues these boring foundations are what separate agents that appear to work in testing from those that survive unobserved production runs on real data. Community engagement is high, with practitioners sharing parallel experiences of reliable demos masking fragile production systems.