I Built Production AI Agents That Handle 50k Messages/month - 's...

Posted on Dec 15

• Originally published at blog.sakaguchi.ia.br

Three months ago, I deployed an AI agent to production. Today, it handles 50,000+ messages monthly with zero downtime. But here's the thing - none of the tutorials prepared me for what actually happened.

Everyone shows you the shiny "hello world" chatbot. Nobody shows you what happens when real users spam your API at 3 AM, or when your LLM decides to hallucinate customer data.

Notice the difference? Production AI agents need six layers of protection that tutorials never mention.

Why it matters: In month one, I blocked 2,847 abuse attempts. Without rate limiting, that's $500+ in wasted API calls.

This one hurt. A user asked for their account balance. The AI agent confidently responded: "Your balance is $127,549.32"

Result: Zero incidents of hallucinated financial data in production.

Here's what nobody tells you: managing conversation context at scale is harder than building the agent itself.

This saved me ~$1,200/month in API costs by intelligently pruning conversation history.

The moment of truth: Your AI provider goes down at 2 AM. What happens?

Source: Dev.to