Agents in the Wild — Production Agent Lab

09:00 – 10:15

See why laptop agents die in production

—the demo-to-production gap, state and secrets audit, the plan

—Takeaway Your agent's hidden assumptions listed — every path, key and in-memory state that will not survive a deployment.

10:30 – 11:45

Containerise the agent

—images for agent workloads, configuration, secrets at runtime

—Takeaway The agent in a container, configured from outside — with a planted secret kept out of the image and proved absent.

12:00 – 13:00

Deploy it as a service

—the agent behind an API, health checks, versioned prompts and tools

—Takeaway Your agent reachable as a deployed service with a health check that means something — and a version you can name.

14:00 – 15:15

Persist the state that matters

—task state in a real store, resumability, what not to persist

—Takeaway A long task killed halfway and resumed exactly where it stopped — because its state lives in a database, not a variable.

15:30 – 17:00

Handle the failures that will happen

—tool outages, model errors, timeouts and compensation

—Takeaway A tool taken down mid-task on purpose — the agent degrading, retrying and completing without corrupting anything.

09:00 – 10:15

Trace every run

—run traces, step attribution, token and cost per task

—Takeaway Twenty production-shaped runs on one dashboard — the expensive one found and explained in under a minute.

10:30 – 11:45

Budget and bound the fleet

—concurrency and queues, rate limits, cost ceilings per task

—Takeaway Fifty tasks submitted at once and handled on your terms — queued, bounded and each under its own cost ceiling.

12:00 – 13:00

Keep humans in the loop at scale

—approval queues, escalation paths, audit trails

—Takeaway Approvals arriving in one queue a human can actually work — with every decision recorded for the audit that will come.

14:00 – 15:15

Rehearse the bad day

—incident drill, the kill switch, stopping without losing work

—Takeaway A live incident drill — the agent misbehaving on cue, caught by its traces, and stopped with the kill switch you tested.

15:30 – 17:00

Write the runbook and hand it over

—what to monitor, when to intervene, handover review

—Takeaway A one-page runbook another engineer could operate your agent from — reviewed by the room as the final exercise.