Migrating Assistants to an Agent Architecture: Production Gotchas

At some point, a “chat assistant” is not enough.

Agents execute.

Migration breaks expectations more than code: where memory lives, how tools are governed, and how quality is enforced.

Checklist

• define roles (gatekeeper/specialists/verifier)
• introduce tool policies and audit trails
• keep explicit state (IDs, steps)
• build evals as regression tests
• enable tracing + metrics