Stop Prompting, Start Engineering: 15 Principles to Deliver Your AI Agent to Production

LLMs don’t read minds — they read tokens. If you’re building agents that must survive beyond the prototype, this article gives you 15 hard-earned principles to engineer stability, control, and scale from day one.

Introduction

At first, you just try to communicate with ChatGPT via API, throw in a couple of lines of context, and feel amazed that it responds at all. Then you want it to do something useful. Then — to do it reliably. Eventually — to do it without you.

That’s how an agent is born.

If you’ve also spent the past year cobbling together agents from scripts and wrappers, experimenting and tinkering, and you’re still searching for a cleaner, more sustainable way to build them — this article is for you. I’ve wandered through repos and forums, repeatedly asking myself, “How are others doing it?” > I kept ...