Production-Ready AI Agents in Node.js: Iteration Caps and Tracing

Short summary

A practical guide to building production-ready AI agents in Node.js using the Anthropic SDK, focusing on iteration caps and OpenTelemetry tracing. Most agent tutorials skip the guardrails that matter in production: capping loop iterations to prevent runaway token spend, using tight tool schemas to reduce hallucinated calls, and tracing each loop iteration as its own span so multi-step failures are debuggable. The author argues Node.js has become the default application layer for AI agents while Python retains training and heavy orchestration.

• •Iteration caps (10 for simple, 25 for complex agents) prevent runaway token spend
• •Tight tool schemas reduce 'why did it do that' bugs from vague contracts
• •OpenTelemetry spans per loop iteration make multi-step agent failures debuggable

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.