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12 Factors for Agent Design establish principles for production LLM-powered agents
Source type Practitioner
Confidence Medium
Last verified 2026-03-25
Topics claude-code

Insight: The 12-factor framework establishes design principles for production agents: own prompts and context windows, treat tools as structured JSON outputs, unify execution and business state, enable pause/resume APIs, use tool calls for human contact, own control flow, compact errors into context, keep agents small (3-10 steps), design as stateless reducers that transform input state to output state, support multi-channel triggering, and separate generation from evaluation.

Detail: These factors move beyond LLM capability to focus on operational architecture. Key principle: treat agents as pure functions that deterministically transform state, enabling reliability and debuggability. This model enables orchestration of autonomous agent teams without deep framework integration.

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