The Agent Development Lifecycle 101 by Harrison Chase
LangChain CEO outlines a five-stage agent lifecycle: build, test, deploy, monitor, govern
“getting something that works, you know, initially locally or in a one-off on a Twitter demo is easy, but like shipping it reliably to 100 of users at scale, the difficulty becomes down down to like the performance and the behavior of the agent”— Harrison Chase
LangChain CEO Harrison Chase presented a framework for the agent development lifecycle, arguing that reliable agent behavior—not initial functionality—is the core challenge of shipping agents at scale. Organizations that successfully ship agents do so by iterating systematically through build, test, deploy, monitor, and govern stages. This codifies emerging best practices from the past year of production agent deployments and positions LangChain's tooling as the enabler of each stage.