The Agent Buddy System: When Prompt Engineering Isn't Enough

Most AI agents don’t reliably follow directions, and that’s one of the biggest reasons they never make it from POC to production. This is how deploying agents usually plays out: you write clear instructions in your prompt, test against every scenario you can think of, and ship it. Then the agent skips steps, drifts from your guidelines, or invents behavior you didn't anticipate. So you add detail, constraints, explicit directions. The prompt is getting huge now but you’re sure you’ve captured all the rules. You deploy again. Same problem. Eventually, you hit a wall and give up.