Production Autonomous Agents: 6 Lessons from 2 Months

Production Autonomous Agents: 6 Lessons from 2 Months in Production ODEI has been running production autonomous agents since January 2026. Here are the lessons. 1. Context Windows Are Not Memory The biggest mistake: treating the context window as memory. Context windows are ephemeral. When the session ends, everything is gone. Production lesson: Use a persistent graph (Neo4j) for anything that matters across sessions. The context window is for reasoning, not storage. 2. Hallucinated References Kill Everything In production, agents hallucinate entity references constantly. "Transfer funds to wallet W" — but wallet W doesn't exist. Production lesson: Add referential integrity checks before any action. ODEI's layer 3 validates every referenced entity exists in the world model before proceeding. 3. Deduplication Is Non-Negotiable Without deduplication, agents will execute the same action twice. We saw this in week 1: the agent sent the same API call three times. Production lesson: Hash eve