The AI Agent Project Lifecycle

A visual guide to the key roles and activities involved in building production-grade AI agents from concept to deployment.

Phase 1: Foundation

Develop Proof of Concept

An initial, small-scale project to test the core idea and technical feasibility of the AI agent.

Key Skills & Tools:

Rapid Prototyping, Python, LangChain, LLM APIs, Streamlit

Data Exploration

Analyzing available data sources to understand their quality, structure, biases, and potential value.

Key Skills & Tools:

Data Analysis, Statistics, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, SQL

Prompt Engineering

The art and science of designing effective inputs (prompts) to guide an LLM to produce the desired output.

Key Skills & Tools:

LLM Behavior, Creative Writing, Logical Reasoning, JSON

Phase 2: Core AI/ML

Develop & Train Models

Building the core ML models that power the agent, or pre-training domain-specific models.

Finetuning Models

Adapting a pre-trained model to a specific domain using a smaller, high-quality dataset.

Embedding Management

Generating, storing, and retrieving vector embeddings for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Evaluating Models

Measuring an agent's performance using robust datasets and metrics to benchmark changes.

Phase 3: Operations

Build Production Apps

Set up Infra

DevOps

MLOps

Testing & QA