Brains vs Hands: How to Run AI Agents Safely in Production — Viren Baraiya

This post introduces the concept of running AI agents in production by framing their harnesses as applications, akin to microservices, rather than simple components. It advocates for a strict separation between the LLM's planning ('brain') and the deterministic, durable execution engine ('hands'). The Orkes Conductor is presented as a solution for this, enabling agents to be scheduled, event-driven, and long-running. Key features highlighted include human approval gates, idempotent steps, recorded side effects, and the compilation of agent plans into durable workflows, effectively treating agent harnesses as late-bound sagas.