Agents in Production — Observability, Safety, and Cost

Why it matters

Prototypes don't become products by accident. Understanding production concerns is what enables the transition.

The architecture

Observability: trace agent trajectories. See tool calls, intermediate reasoning, outcomes.

Safety: guardrails on tools, output filtering, human-in-loop for critical actions.

How it works end to end

Cost: agents make many LLM calls. Track cost per task; set budgets; alert on runaways.

Reliability: caps on iteration count, tool failure handling, graceful degradation.

User trust: transparency about what agent will do; consent for actions.

Incident response: agents behaving badly need fast disable capability.