Sam Witteveen · 2026-04-15 · notable
Must-Haves for Agents in Production
Sam Witteveen's checklist of what an agent system actually needs to survive in production — observability, retries, eval, escalation.
What separates a demo agent from a production agent, in Sam Witteveen's experience.
What is it?
A Sam Witteveen explainer video listing what production agents actually need beyond a working prompt: observability, retry logic, evals, escalation paths, and graceful failure.
How does it work?
Sam walks through each category with examples of what breaks when you skip them. Channel is known for grounded engineering content rather than hype.
Why does it matter?
Most agent demos collapse the moment they hit real load and real users. This kind of checklist is what teams reach for when they realize the prompt was the easy part.
Who is it for?
Engineers about to ship their first agent to production users.
Try it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIy85-gIDzI