Brains vs Hands: How to Run AI Agents Safely in Production — Viren Baraiya

Viren Baraiya, CTO of Orkes and original creator of Netflix Conductor, explains why production agents behave like applications built from microservices. He argues for splitting the work between a non-deterministic LLM that plans and a deterministic, durable harness that executes, with approval gates, idempotent steps, and recorded side effects. He frames agent harnesses as late-bound sagas and demos an SRE remediation agent whose plan is compiled into a Conductor workflow.