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Why AI Agents Need Agile, Not Just Better Prompts

Prompts get you the first working run. Iteration gets you the hundredth.

Sukhpinder Singh

4 min read·<br>Just now

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Your agent passes the demo clean. Then it meets its third real user and quietly falls apart — loops on a step it never hit in testing, calls a tool with garbage arguments, burns tokens going nowhere.<br>That gap between the demo and the third user is the whole problem. And no amount of prompt tweaking closes it, because the prompt was never the hard part.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

Treating agent development like Agile delivery, not one-shot prompting.The prompt was never the hard part<br>Prompt engineering sells you a feeling. You write the wording, the agent does the thing once, and it feels finished.<br>But an agent isn’t one call. It’s a loop: plan, call a tool, read the result, decide again, maybe a dozen times before it stops. Every step is a place to drift.<br>A prompt is a spec you wrote once. Agile exists because specs written once are wrong. Agents have the same failure mode — just faster, and more expensive when they’re wrong at runtime instead of in review.<br>A loop drifts in ways a single call never does<br>When you test a chat completion, you check one input and one output. Done. When you test an agent, you’re…

Published in Open AI<br>293 followers<br>·Last published just now

Exploring the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence with OpenAI, Chat GPT Models, Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning, Azure and many more.

Written by Sukhpinder Singh

3.1K followers<br>·40 following

C# .Net developer 👨‍💻 who's 100% convinced my bugs are funnier than yours. 🐛💥 #BugLife Pubs: https://medium.com/c-sharp-programming

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