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.

Mer från AI Engineer

Inside Arca's Long-Horizon Agents That Run the Business - Aman Singh, Arca

AI Engineer · 23 okt.

Real AI Agent Attacks and What Would Have Stopped Them — Andrey Rybka, Bloomberg

AI Engineer · 23 okt.

Outside of tech there has been no financial payoff to US companies for using AI, now viewed as a margin-hurting cost center, as VC-backed firms burn more tokens

Techmeme · för 3 tim sedan

Source: Replit recently moved most AI spend from Anthropic to OpenAI, which gave 30%+ off in a deal worth $100M+/year, after Anthropic discontinued its discount

Techmeme · för 5 tim sedan