Brains vs Hands: How to Run AI Agents Safely in Production — Viren Baraiya
Let the model decide what should happen next. Never let it improvise how a production cluster gets restarted.
Viren Baraiya, co-founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, explains how to run agents in production. Real agents aren't just chatbots: they run on schedules, react to events, coordinate other agents and can run for months, so the harness around them starts to look like an application, much like a set of microservices. His key idea is a clean split between the brain and the hands. The LLM plans what should happen next; a deterministic, durable harness does the actual work, with approval gates, idempotent steps and recorded side effects. He frames agent harnesses as late-bound sagas, workflows the agent assembles at runtime, and demos an SRE agent whose plan is compiled into a Conductor workflow, executed, checked and re-planned over two loops.
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