Production-Grade LLMs and Agents: A Field Guide
Stack Overflow Blog, Monday, October 19th, 2026
A maturity model for taking AI agents from demo to production: determinism, evals, calibrated confidence, guardrails, audit and observability.
This field guide argues that the gap between an agent that demos well and one you can trust with customers or money is the engineering around the model, not a bigger model.
Its advice is to shrink the model's job to the smallest decision that needs judgment and wrap it in deterministic, testable, auditable machinery.
It presents a layered maturity model with a self-assessment: determinism, then evaluation, calibrated confidence, safe automation, scaling and observability.
It recommends fixing the weakest layer first and links to deep-dives on each.