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Enterprise AI

AI Agent Development

How do you build production AI agents for an enterprise?

Direct answer

Production AI agent development is the engineering work of turning a workflow into an agent an organization can run: defining the goal and tool contracts, bounding permissions and data, evaluating behaviour against fixed cases, instrumenting cost and latency, and gating consequential actions behind a recorded human decision.

Definition

AI agent development

Designing, building, and operating an agent that completes real work in production: architecture and orchestration, the tools it may call, the data it may see, the evaluations that prove it still works, and the approval path for anything consequential.

Scope

What we build

Agents that do a specific job inside your estate, not general assistants.

  • Workflow agents

    A defined business process end to end - intake, enrichment, decision support, resolution - across the systems it already touches.

  • Tool and MCP layers

    Typed tool contracts over your APIs, databases, and SaaS systems, with authentication and permission boundaries enforced at the contract.

  • Evaluation harnesses

    Fixed cases, graded outputs, and regression gates wired into CI, so behaviour changes are visible before release.

  • Approval interfaces

    The queue where a human sees a proposal with its evidence and approves, edits, or rejects with a reason.

Scope

How the work is sequenced

The order matters: we establish what "working" means before building the thing that has to work.

  • Define the job

    The workflow, its systems, its failure modes, and the observable definition of a correct outcome.

  • Build the evaluation first

    Fixed cases drawn from real history, so quality is measurable from the first commit rather than argued about later.

  • Build the agent and its tools

    Architecture, orchestration, typed tool contracts, bounded permissions.

  • Instrument and gate

    Tracing, cost and latency budgets, risk tiers, approval path, audit retention.

  • Operate and iterate

    Decisions and realised outcomes feed back as context, so the system improves on evidence rather than opinion.

Named methodology

The Propose–Decide–Execute pattern

CodeDTX builds agentic systems on the Propose–Decide–Execute pattern: agents may only write proposals with evidence attached, a named human records an approval or rejection with a reason, and a separate execution layer carries out approved work and logs the artifact. No agent holds a write tool to the outside world.

  1. 01

    Propose

    The agent analyses live system state and drafts a change, with the evidence it relied on attached to the proposal.

  2. 02

    Decide

    A named human approves, edits, or rejects with a reason. Risk tier determines who is allowed to decide.

  3. 03

    Execute

    A separate execution layer performs approved work - merge, publish, call, write - and records the resulting artifact.

  4. 04

    Audit

    Actor, reason, evidence, artifact, tokens, and cost are retained for every run, so any decision can be reconstructed later.

Reference architecture

The six layers we build and review against

  1. 1

    Agent layer

    Agent architecture, tool use, memory and context, multi-agent patterns, structured outputs, orchestration.

  2. 2

    Integration layer

    MCP servers, tool contracts, API and database adapters, authentication, permissions, legacy system access.

  3. 3

    Knowledge layer

    Retrieval and RAG, vector and search architecture, enterprise knowledge sources, data access controls.

  4. 4

    Reliability layer

    Evals, tracing, observability, cost and latency budgets, fallbacks, regression tests.

  5. 5

    Safety layer

    Guardrails, prompt-injection defense, PII and data boundaries, human-in-the-loop gates, audit trails.

  6. 6

    Product layer

    The application people actually use: interfaces, approval queues, and operational runbooks.

Questions

Frequently asked

How do you build a production AI agent?

Define the workflow and what a correct outcome looks like, build the evaluation harness before the agent, then build the agent with typed tool contracts and bounded permissions, instrument tracing and cost, and gate consequential actions behind human approval.

What is the difference between an agent demo and a production agent?

A demo shows the happy path. A production agent has enumerated permissions, evaluations that catch regressions, traces that explain any run, budgets that cap cost, fallbacks for failure, and an approval path for consequential actions.

Which models and frameworks do you use?

We choose per workload rather than standardising on one, and we keep model choice behind an interface so it can change without rebuilding the system. The architecture, tool contracts, and evaluations are the durable parts.

How do you measure whether an agent is working?

Against fixed evaluation cases graded on defined criteria, plus production signals: task completion, human override rate, cost and latency per run, and the realised outcome of approved actions.

Have a workflow that should become AI-enabled?

Tell us about the system it lives in. We reply from an engineering seat, not a sales deck.