12-Factor Agents: Production Engineering Manifesto for LLM Systems

HumanLayer·high signal

A language-agnostic manifesto of 12 production engineering principles for LLM agents from HumanLayer, modeled after 12-Factor App. Key principles include: own your prompts and context window, make agents stateless reducers, unify execution and business state, compact errors into context, contact humans via tool calls, and own your control flow. The core thesis is that the best agents aren't the most autonomous — they use LLMs for controlled, bounded transformations within deterministic orchestration.