What building Shippy taught us about building agents

Building the AI agent Shippy for maritime domain awareness required a focus on reliability for high-stakes decisions. The agent's architecture is composed of a "soul" for its persona, "skills" for handling specific tasks, and a runtime configuration. To manage the non-deterministic nature of the underlying LLM, Shippy interacts with data through a deterministic, purpose-built CLI instead of direct API calls. Each user session is run in an isolated, sandboxed Kubernetes environment to ensure security and data privacy.