The Three Ways AI Agents Fail in Production | Hendrix Liu, Respan

What does it actually take to run AI agents reliably in production? Hendrix Liu, co-founder of Respan (formerly Keywords AI, YC W24), joins Shane and Abhi to break it down. Respan is a one-stop LLM engineering platform — an AI gateway, observability, evals, and prompt optimization in one place. Hendrix shares the three failure modes every agent team runs into (silent failures, reliability outages, and runaway cost), and the techniques to catch each one: fallback routing across 1,000+ models when a provider goes down, online evals that flag hallucinations before a customer does, and spend limits at the per-key, per-model, and per-customer level. Plus the counterintuitive origin story, a live demo of their Scratch-style evaluators, and an honest take on build vs. buy for the LLM stack.