Code Quality Had 5 Pillars. AI Broke 3 and Created 2 We Can’t Measure

Taking an AI agent from prototype to production requires solving six core problems: config and model governance, state and memory design, security boundaries, evaluation pipelines, and operational monitoring. Prototypes break in production through state collisions, leaked secrets, tool abuse, and zero observability. This guide gives engineers a concrete architecture path covering checkpointing, guardrails, eval gates in CI/CD, and behavioral monitoring to run agents reliably under real load.