// guides
Hiring someone to build your AI agent.
Type "hire AI agent developer" and the results are body shops with stock photos, $22/hour rate cards, and portfolios you can't click. The market is young, the demos are easy to fake, and the gap between "worked in the pitch" and "worked in month three" is where your budget goes to die.
One filter removes most of the risk: ask for a system of theirs running in production, unattended, today — with a URL. Not a case study PDF. Not a video. A link. Anyone competent in this field has automated something for themselves; a developer selling automation who hasn't automated their own work is telling you something.
The questions that separate builders from demo-makers
the real answer names retries, alerts, fallbacks, and a human gate. The fake answer is "it won't."
you want to hear evals, regression cases, versioned prompts. If prompts live in a dashboard nobody reviews, your agent's behavior is one edit away from anyone's guess.
a builder quotes API, hosting, and maintenance without flinching. A demo-maker hasn't run anything long enough to know.
the only acceptable answer is you, in a repo under your account, from day one.
Where we fit, stated plainly
Anchor 163 is a small San Francisco team — Fortune 100 platform background, and self-operating systems running publicly under our own name, checkable under // live below before you ever email us. Builds from $5,000. If your project needs a ten-person team, we'll say so in the first call and point you at better-fit shops. Either way, run the URL filter on us and on everyone else you talk to.
Common questions
Ask for a URL to a system of theirs running unattended in production today. Then ask what happens when it fails, how prompt changes are tested, what monthly running costs will be, and who owns the code. Weak answers to any of these predict a failed project.
For prototypes, sometimes. For production agents touching real customers and real data, the failure modes are expensive and usually surface after handoff. Total cost including the rebuild typically exceeds a senior builder’s quote.
You, in a repository under your own account, from day one — including prompts, which should be versioned and tested like any other code.
studio@anchor163.com
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