What I wish I knew before deploying my first AI agent to production

Lessons I wish someone had given me at the start.

1. Test with real data, not demo data. The gap between them will surprise you.

2. Log everything, even when it feels excessive. Audit requests will come.

3. The model's confidence is not the same as the model's correctness. Build for the gap.

4. Production loads are different from demo loads. Concurrency reveals everything.

5. The first version will not be the version that scales. Plan for the rewrite.

What's the lesson you wish someone had handed you on day one?

Feel free to share your experience below and we can discuss them further