Agentic AI in Production

Agentic AI means systems that take autonomous action on behalf of humans — agents that call APIs, mutate databases, and make irreversible decisions without a human in the loop for every step. The gap between "we have agents" and "our agents compound in production" is not prompting skill. It is systems engineering: versioned skills, shift-aware handoffs, evaluation infrastructure, and governance that was not designed for generative AI. The research below covers the specific patterns we see in engineering teams that ship agentic AI without incident — and the patterns that predictably produce incidents.