AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 — unofficial import demo

Building an AI demo is easy. Knowing whether it actually works — and keeping it working in production — is the hard part. Most teams ship agents on vibes: they try a few prompts, the output looks good, and they push to production with no real way to measure quality or catch regressions.
This hands-on workshop walks through the full lifecycle of shipping a real AI agent, using a working financial-analyst agent built on the Claude Agent SDK as the running example. You'll instrument it with tracing, do structured error analysis on its actual outputs, and build a layered evaluation suite — from cheap deterministic code checks to LLM-as-a-judge evaluators with custom rubrics. We'll cover the parts most tutorials skip: why agents fail in ways single LLM calls don't, the eval anti-patterns that quietly mislead you, and how to know whether you can even trust your judge (meta-evaluation). Finally, we'll close the loop: turning eval results into datasets and experiments, running evals online against production traffic, wiring them to monitors and alerts, and feeding failure explanations back to a coding agent to actually fix the underlying problems.
You'll leave with a runnable notebook and a repeatable, evaluation-driven workflow you can apply to your own agents the next day.