Wiring AI Agents to the Real World: The Integration Layer Nobody Talks About
- Time
- 2026-08-09 10:45 ~ 11:15
- Speaker
- Teo Richie
- Room
- AU
- Co-write
- https://hackmd.io/HkGOyNl8Ge
Abstract
Everyone talks about prompts, models, and RAG. This talk is about what I call the other 80 percent: the integration work required to turn a convincing model response into a dependable product. Production systems must authenticate a real user, reach the correct account, route events from different channels, run on schedule, and explain what happened afterward.
Drawing on lessons from Alfred, a multi-agent orchestration platform, this talk presents the integration layer as a set of operational contracts. A live public demo sends the same task to the same OpenRouter model on two plain pages. One has no inbox or tools. The other uses three constrained tools over a synthetic inbox and records a verified draft. We use that controlled difference to examine OAuth token lifecycles, multi-user credential ownership, declarative Slack, Telegram, and web routing, schedules as normal agent runs, and observability for cost, tool calls, subagents, and delegation failures.
The demo is intentionally not Alfred and contains no production integrations. Attendees leave with a framework-agnostic checklist for deciding what to own, constrain, verify, and record before an agent touches the real world.
Speaker
Teo Richie
Richie is a Lead Experience Engineer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with five years of experience building software products. He works at the intersection of backend systems and user-facing product, with a focus on making complex infrastructure feel simple to use. His recent work includes Alfred, a multi-agent orchestration platform. This project pushed him deep into the practical challenges of running AI systems in production, which is what this talk is about.