How to build an AI agent that survives contact with real users
A demo agent works because the person demoing it knows what to type. Seven decisions that decide whether an agent holds up once real people use it.
What the page covers
- Making the job one sentence long, with a list of refusals
- Giving the agent tools, not authority
- Treating everything it reads as untrusted
- Saying "I don't know" and handing off to a person
- Rate, length, tool-call and spending limits
- Logging and testing it like software
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI agent?
- A chatbot answers questions in a conversation. An agent can also take actions: look something up, create a record, send a message or call another system. The extra capability is what makes agents useful, and it is why they need tighter limits than a chatbot does.
- What is prompt injection and should I worry about it?
- Prompt injection is text, in a message, a web page or a document, that tries to make the model ignore its instructions. Yes, worry about it whenever the agent reads content you do not control or can take actions. The defence is design, not a clever prompt: untrusted text is treated as data, and tools are limited to what the job needs.
- How do I know if my agent is good enough to launch?
- Write down thirty to fifty real questions and the answer or behaviour you expect for each, including some you want it to refuse. Run them before every change. If the pass rate drops after an edit, you have caught a regression before a customer did.
Akshay Mahajan — full-stack & AI web developer, Surat, Gujarat, India. akshaymad0608@gmail.com · +91 76008 85080