Ship a Bad Agent Fast, Then Iterate

Perfectionism Kills Agent Projects

I've seen teams spend months building the "perfect" agent architecture. Meanwhile, I shipped a janky prototype in a week and learned more from 100 real users than any amount of planning could teach.

My Shipping Checklist

Week 1: The Ugly Prototype

• Single prompt, no chain
• Hardcoded fallbacks
• Manual monitoring (yes, I watched logs)

Week 2-3: The Learning Loop

• Added logging for every decision
• Classified failures into categories
• Built prompt chains for the top 3 failure modes

Month 2: The Real Agent

• Multi-step reasoning where needed
• Proper error recovery
• Automated quality scoring

The Lesson

You can't design an agent in a vacuum. Ship early, instrument everything, and let real usage guide the architecture.