7 Production Patterns for AI Agents That Don't Break in 2026

A agent that loops three times, calls one tool, and returns "Hello, I helped you" is easy. A production agent that handles 10k requests a day across paying customers, without lighting your API bill on fire or hallucinating tool arguments at 3am, is a different animal. I've shipped AI agents in production for the last 18 months - search, content generation, triage, document analysis. The same seven patterns keep showing up in every codebase that actually works. None of them are exotic. Most of them are boring. That's the point: production agents are boring on purpose.