From prototype to production: Engineering agents with Agent DLC

AWS authors propose the Agent Development Lifecycle (Agent DLC), which ties six activities—Define, Build, Evaluate, Release, Observe, and Feed Back—to an explicit "gold standard" of criteria, thresholds, and approved examples, with an inner loop (score, inspect the path, change one thing, re-evaluate) and an outer loop that updates the standard from production feedback. A reference HR policy assistant shows chunk-level retrieval precision of 1.00 on all three test questions while fact-level precision was 0.59, 0.53, and 0.09, and a prompt-only change improved one question but worsened another, which the authors attribute to missing source coverage. The post also describes a benefits-enrollment answer that scored 0.90 groundedness yet made a false claim about the user's contact preference, and outlines a one-week AWS getting-started plan using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Evaluations and Observability.