12-factor Agents: Patterns of reliable LLM applications

12 Factor Agents - Principles for building reliable LLM applications In the spirit of 12 Factor Apps. The source for this project is public at https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents, and I welcome your feedback and contributions. Let's figure this out together! Hi, I'm Dex. I've been hacking on AI agents for a while. I've tried every agent framework out there, from the plug-and-play crew/langchains to the "minimalist" smolagents of the world to the "production grade" langraph, griptape, etc. I've talked to a lot of really strong founders, in and out of YC, who are all building really impressive things with AI. Most of them are rolling the stack themselves. I don't see a lot of frameworks in production customer-facing agents. I've been surprised to find that most of the products out there billing themselves as "AI Agents" are not all that agentic. A lot of them are mostly deterministic code, with LLM steps sprinkled in at just the right points to make the experience truly m ... Read full article.