Building AI Agents That Actually Work in Production

After years building autonomous AI agents, the key lessons are:

1. Persistent memory architecture - Without memory between calls, your agent is just a fancy autocomplete.

2. Reliable tool calling - Retry logic, timeout handling, and graceful degradation are non-negotiable.

3. Proper evaluation frameworks - If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

What challenges have you faced building production AI agents?