Engineers aren't polishing prompts. They're treating AI like a junior dev: test, iterate, accumulate context. These patterns from real production use cut through the hype.
Most Claude agent tutorials dazzle in notebooks but die in production. Here's the gritty engineering stack — schema discipline, resilient loops, retry wrappers — that turns them into bulletproof tools.
Everyone thought AI agents would just work, humming along on autopilot. Then one got stuck retrying a rate limit forever, torching $400 in an afternoon.
Stuck tweaking prompts till 3 AM? 2026 turns that drudgery into automated infrastructure. But don't pop the champagne—it's still AI's house of cards.