Brains vs Hands: How to Run AI Agents Safely in Production — Viren Baraiya

Let the model decide what should happen next. Never let it improvise how a production cluster gets restarted. Viren Baraiya, co-founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, explains how to run agents in production. Real agents aren't just chatbots: they run on schedules, react to events, coordinate other agents and can run for months, so the harness around them starts to look like an application, much like a set of microservices. His key idea is a clean split between the brain and the hands. The LLM plans what should happen next; a deterministic, durable harness does the actual work, with approval gates, idempotent steps and recorded side effects. He frames agent harnesses as late-bound sagas, workflows the agent assembles at runtime, and demos an SRE agent whose plan is compiled into a Conductor workflow, executed, checked and re-planned over two loops. In this talk: • Background, scheduled, event-driven and long-running agents • Why the harness is the application, mixing deterministic and non-deterministic parts • The brain and the hands: the LLM plans, the harness executes • Demo: an SRE agent's plan compiled into a durable workflow SPEAKER Viren Baraiya, Co-founder & CTO, Orkes X: https://x.com/virenbaraiya LINKS Orkes: https://orkes.io Orkes on X: https://x.com/orkesio CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:47 Who runs agents in production? 1:12 Beyond the hello-world agent 1:52 Background, scheduled and event-driven agents 2:27 Coordinators and multi-agent systems 3:02 Agents are applications, not components 3:12 Lessons from microservices 4:22 The harness is the application 5:02 Deterministic and non-deterministic parts 6:02 Harnesses run for seconds or months 6:41 Durability is table stakes 7:26 How the loop works 8:21 The agent plans, the harness executes 9:21 Human approval gates 9:41 Idempotency and side effects 9:56 The brain and the hands 10:21 Agent harnesses as late-bound sagas 11:21 Every possible branch 11:51 Demo: an SRE agent 13:31 Compiling the plan into a workflow 14:16 Demo: the second loop 15:56 Conductor, open source Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #AIAgents #WorkflowOrchestration #AIEngineer