The Hardest Problems in Building Production AI Agents
· 25 min read
Every AI agent demo looks the same. The model calls a tool, gets a result, and responds. Then you run it against real infrastructure, and the demo falls apart in ways the tutorials never mention.
We have spent over a year building Nova, an AI agent that operates real infrastructure for real teams. It is not a chatbot that wraps API calls. It investigates incidents, executes remediations, and composes across dozens of integrations. This post is about what we learned: the problems that made us rebuild entire subsystems, and the patterns that survived.