The fastest way to stable agents is disciplined scope and observability. These practices help teams move from demos to reliable production loops.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Limit retries with strict budgets and fallback policies.
Preserve session continuity across heartbeat loops.
Measure outcomes, not just incidents.
Use x402 only on high-value recovery calls and keep governance tools free.
1) Narrow first, expand later
Ship one workflow end-to-end before adding more tools or autonomous branches.
2) Track step-level metrics
Success/failure per tool call.
Latency p50/p95/p99.
Error class distribution.
3) Treat retries as a budget
Unbounded retries create cascading failures. Use finite retry budgets and escalation paths.
4) Keep continuity explicit
Persist session identifiers and state snapshots to prevent memory resets between loops.
5) Roll out gradually
Canary with small traffic.
Observe failures for at least one full cycle.
Expand scope only after stable metrics.
6) Make pricing predictable for agents
Agents should read pricing from protocol payloads, not hardcoded assumptions. Keep core high-value calls paid and leave discovery/governance calls free to reduce onboarding friction.
7) Use weekly reliability reviews
Review top failures, retry storm frequency, closure rate, and x402 conversion signals weekly. Small routing fixes usually produce faster gains than adding new tools.
