Most AI agent tutorials get you to "hello world" and stop there. The problem starts the moment you chain two agents together.
Here's what they don't tell you: reliability compounds. If each step in your pipeline succeeds 95% of the time, a 3-step agent has an effective success rate of 86%. At 10 steps? You're at 60%. That's not a bug in your code. That's math.
"The compound reliability problem is why most production AI agent systems fail not on hard tasks, but on sequences of easy ones."
The article breaks down exactly what this means in practice: how to structure agents to minimize cascade failures, which orchestration patterns actually hold up in production, and the three design decisions most beginners get backwards.
If you're building your first agent or wondering why your multi-step pipeline keeps breaking at step 4, this is the piece I wish existed when I started.
Full guide: https://www.roborhythms.com/how-to-build-ai-agent/
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