Most agent demos impress. Most agent deployments fail. The gap is constraints. An autonomous system that can do anything will eventually do the wrong thing. I design task-specific agents with defined boundaries — scoped to one job, auditable at every step.
Narrow scope beats general purpose
A general-purpose agent sounds powerful until it hallucinates a clinical recommendation or approves a transaction it shouldn’t. Task-specific agents take structured inputs, follow defined logic, and produce validated outputs. They do one thing. They do it reliably. That’s the point.
Human-in-the-loop is a design choice
Not a fallback. Not a workaround for an agent that isn’t good enough. In regulated environments, certain decisions require human judgment by law. I design the handoff points intentionally — where the agent presents options and a human decides — so compliance is built into the workflow, not bolted on.
What ships
An agent that receives a discharge summary and extracts medication changes. One that reads a financial filing and flags covenant breaches. Each knows exactly what it accepts and what it returns. Decision logging for audit trails. Configurable approval gates. Monitoring that flags anomalies before they become incidents.