How I buld agents

Everyday I see tons of AI generated posts about tricks to build AI agents. Here is one written by a human with experience and typos :)

Step 1: Never directly compete with a human

Is there a specific job title for sth? Stay away. Is this a 10% overhead for a team of people, great!

Why? People are suprisingly amazing at ther main job, overhead not so much.

Step 2: Forget about AI(80% of work)

Figure out where the data lives, how the workflow works etc. Use automation tools (n8n, zapier,...) and connect to all data sources move the data around and use predefined outputs.

Why? This is the only way to make systems robust, otherwise you will have half baked agent with half baked conectivity. Great for POC, horrible for production.

Step 3: Forget about adding infrastucture

RAG etc. Is great, but this adds a whole new level of complexity, another DB to CRUD, another bill to pay hosting+embeddings

Why? Rag etc. Its a final push for accuracy and most of the time not needed

Step 4: Use agentic search

If human can fill out the search form and refin search so can an agent. This gives direct explainability + direct keyword search.

Why? Cheap and explainable.

Step 5: Use reranker models to cut costs

When working with data + search use reranker models, to reduce context size from 100k to 5k, amazing savings.

Why? Cut costs without sacraficing accuracy

Step 6: Logg everything

Things will happen, you as developer have to know why.

Step 7: Agent starts in workspace ends in workspace

Any extra UI, pages etc. Slow down addoption greatly. It has to be simpler to use it then not to.

Step 9: API vs. MCP

MCP is just an API wrapper with great documnetation and buisness oriented actions. Any API can be made into MCP any MCP is API. Do not overcomplicate.

Step 8: Happy clients.

In short, the more controlled enviroment you can create for your agents the better they will work. Do not procure infrastucture before production, this is improvment. Do not use RAG before production, this is improvment. Keep agents easy to use, easy to track and easy to manage.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk!

If you have any queations hit me up.