Everyone has built a demo agent. It answered correctly, someone in the room said “transformative,” and a manager began quietly drafting a press release.
Then it met production. Real users, real cost ceilings, and real consequences when it confidently does the wrong thing at three in the morning while you sleep. This talk lives in that gap. Using the Microsoft Agent Framework and C#, we build a multi-step agent and then do all the unglamorous things the demos skip: tool calls over MCP, guardrails, evaluations so you actually know whether it works, cost and latency control, and a plan for the moment it goes gloriously off the rails. Live coding, real failure modes, and the patterns that stop an agent becoming an expensive, confident accident.
You'll leave with a checklist for getting from “neat” to “in production and not on fire.”

Live coding; reliable internet or local-model fallback advised.