5 Essential Tools to Install Before Building an AI Agent
The article outlines five critical setup steps—privacy with direnv and a secret manager, token handling via litellm or portkey, context management using uv and git commits, visibility through mitmproxy, and rigorous evaluation with inspect‑ai—showing how they cut token waste by 68.3%, reduce costs 92.5% and raise evaluation pass rates to 94.2% across 347 runs.
