Stop Building Chatbots. Start Building Agents.

The demo trap

Every team's first agent demo works. That is the trap. A chatbot answers; an agent *acts* — and action means failure modes your demo never met: stale context, half-finished plans, tools that lie.

Three shifts that matter

1. From answers to outcomes. Measure task completion, not response quality.
2. From prompts to policies. Production agents need guardrails encoded as code, not vibes.
3. From context stuffing to context engineering. The window is a budget. Spend it like money.

Where to start

Pick one workflow your team does weekly, wrap it in an agent loop with three tools, and add an eval before you add a fourth tool. That ordering — eval before capability — is the whole secret.

while not done:
    plan = llm.plan(state)
    result = tools.run(plan.next_step)
    state = update(state, result)
    done = judge.accept(state)   # eval-first, always

If you want the guided version, our 30 Days of Hermes Agent bootcamp walks this exact path.