This is a solid guide. I’d add that testing different variations can reveal some unexpected results. What works for one setup doesn’t always work for another.

This matches what I see on the buyer side. Most "agent" products I evaluate for clients are a Zapier flow with a GPT call bolted on — no memory, no retries, no tool selection logic. The agents that actually earn their keep tend to be narrow and boring: one job, deterministic fallback, visible logs. The flashy "autonomous workflow" demos almost always collapse at week 3 when an edge case nobody planned for shows up.