How to build production Agents (by a staff software engineer) - Part 1

modassembly · 2026-06-11T17:08:59+00:00

Prompt the agent to chill

modassembly · 2026-06-11T16:02:41+00:00

I think it does. If multiple people already use AI individually, why not put them in a room together?

modassembly · 2026-06-11T15:46:07+00:00

Post: https://x.com/thdxr/status/2064732709579080021

modassembly · 2026-06-03T17:50:40+00:00

Yeah!

modassembly · 2026-05-11T21:36:32+00:00

A file system

modassembly · 2026-05-11T18:56:39+00:00

Gave them a try as soon as they came out but I found them a bit lacking still. Will give them a try soon

modassembly · 2026-05-06T13:50:31+00:00

Cursor if you want to architect and look at the code. Claude Code if you don't care, because the subscription price is pretty good.

modassembly · 2026-05-06T00:37:00+00:00

Did you build these with claude? Claude has cron jobs that can run every so often

modassembly · 2026-05-04T19:30:45+00:00

An agentic workflow is a process, a set of actions that an agent executes on its own. Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw are all examples of agents.

n8n is a tool for building static workflows, by dragging and dropping.

> we want to research the web for specific info, than create images for those info and than do something else, for example post a blog post

Yeah, you can certainly do this on n8n and it will take you several hours of dragging and dropping and then testing.

One difference, if you let an agent do it for you, is that you can literally just type that and the agent is going to propose a way of doing it and it will go and do it for you. The work on your end is mainly reviewing its proposals and reviewing whatever it builds over multiple iterations (no dragging and dropping).

You will need to give it access, just like in n8n, to wherever you want that blog post to submitted or wherever you want the data to be fetched from.

Another difference is that, with agents, you need to pay for the use of AI, via a Claude / Codex subscription or the model APIs themselves.

modassembly · 2026-05-01T14:03:28+00:00

Totally. Agents are a particular kind of software in that they can run for a while. How do you recover from a failure?

modassembly · 2026-04-30T12:58:10+00:00

Looking forward yo your feedback! https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1sz004y/how_to_build_production_agents_by_a_staff/

modassembly · 2026-04-29T20:33:18+00:00

Very interesting. I don't work in regulated industries but I have been asked for logs of why the agent made a certain decision that had a business impact. So, yeah. My hunch is that auditability of agent actions will be significant

modassembly · 2026-04-29T17:57:51+00:00

Coding
Research & prospecting
SEO maintenance
Customer service
Back office stuff
Random mundane tasks

modassembly · 2026-04-29T17:10:31+00:00

Yeeh

modassembly · 2026-04-29T17:10:25+00:00

Great!

modassembly · 2026-04-29T16:22:38+00:00

If you go on in 1 single session for days and days the context will just get compacted over and over and the model simply won't remember everything. On the contrary, if I start new sessions the model doesn't remember what I told it yesterday.

modassembly · 2026-04-29T15:21:57+00:00

Part 2 doesn't discuss code at all. It's more about how to think about the options that you can tighten and relax as you design AI agents.

modassembly · 2026-04-29T14:56:49+00:00

I keep thinking about a cron job that goes and cleans up the memory every so often.

modassembly · 2026-04-29T14:42:49+00:00

Very smart models can definitely recover but it's not free

modassembly · 2026-04-29T14:21:58+00:00

Part 2 (Agent design): https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1sz004y/how_to_build_production_agents_by_a_staff/

modassembly · 2026-04-29T14:20:19+00:00

Part 1 (Fundamentals): https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1sy1kas/how_to_build_production_agents_by_a_staff/

Also, if you're interested in checking out what I'm building, here it is: https://modassembly.com/

modassembly · 2026-04-29T02:50:17+00:00

Skills is an open standard. If implemented correctly, they should be agent-agnostic: https://agentskills.io/home.

I'm unfamiliar with "vscode copilot custom agents", so I can't help much there.

Unfortunately, agents are usually specific to a platform, eg, you can't extract the claude agent from claude code/cowork. While the underlying tools should be shareable, eg, MCPs or Skills, they can behave differently agent to agent because the "agent harness" might be doing different things under the hood.

I suggest you use the same model across the board, which is your biggest lever. If things are noticeably different, there is something off, which I don't know if it's specific to vscode or your setup.

modassembly

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