humanlayer/12-factor-agents: What are the principles we can use to build LLM-powered software that is actually good enough to put in the hands of production customers?

• Factor 1: Natural Language to Tool Calls
• Factor 2: Own your prompts
• Factor 3: Own your context window
• Factor 4: Tools are just structured outputs
• Factor 5: Unify execution state and business state
• Factor 6: Launch/Pause/Resume with simple APIs
• Factor 7: Contact humans with tool calls
• Factor 8: Own your control flow
• Factor 9: Compact Errors into Context Window
• Factor 10: Small, Focused Agents
• Factor 11: Trigger from anywhere, meet users where they are
• Factor 12: Make your agent a stateless reducer

ai