Airflow

12-Factor Agents: Patterns of reliable LLM applications — Dex Horthy, HumanLayer

Jul 3, 2025 · 17:06

Dex Horthy, founder of HumanLayer, presents the 12-Factor Agents framework for building reliable LLM-powered applications, arguing that production-grade agents are primarily deterministic software with targeted LLM steps rather than fully autonomous loops. He distills patterns: own prompts and context windows, treat tools as JSON and code, use small focused agents with three to ten steps, contact humans via tool calls. Horthy emphasizes context engineering—LLMs are pure functions—and shows how to compact errors, unify state, and add pause/resume via APIs. He shares a DevOps agent that became a bash script, and advocates for outer-loop agents. The framework, which gained 4,000 GitHub stars in two months, treats agents as stateless reducers that meet users on any channel, with engineers controlling the inner loop of token and control flow.

How agents broke app-level infrastructure - Evan Boyle

Jun 3, 2025 · 13:32

Evan Boyle, founder of GenSX, argues that LLM-powered agents have broken assumptions about app-level infrastructure, as p1 latency jumps from milliseconds to seconds and workflows run minutes to hours. He explains that traditional serverless providers timeout after 5 minutes, lack native streaming, and force brittle Rube Goldberg machines on top of queues like SQS or tools like Airflow. Boyle presents an open-source library that separates API and compute layers using Redis streams for resumability, enabling users to refresh pages or navigate away without losing progress. He demonstrates components with built-in retries, caching, and tracing, and a workflow that automates Hacker News analysis. Key architectural lessons include starting simple but planning for long-running agents, keeping compute and API planes separate, and leaning on Redis for resumability.