Orkes CTO Viren Baraiya Presents 'Brains vs Hands' Architecture for Safe AI Agents at AI Engineer World's Fair
Viren Baraiya, co-founder and CTO of Orkes and original creator of Netflix Conductor, presented at the 2026 AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco on running AI agents safely in production. He proposed a 'brains vs hands' split where the LLM plans actions while a deterministic, durable harness executes them with approval gates and idempotency. The talk included a demo of an SRE agent whose plan was compiled into a Conductor workflow.
At the 2026 AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco, Viren Baraiya, co-founder and CTO of Orkes and the original creator of Netflix Conductor, delivered a talk on how to run AI agents safely in production. Baraiya emphasized that real agents are not just chatbots; they run on schedules, react to events, coordinate other agents, and can operate for months. Consequently, the infrastructure surrounding these agents begins to resemble complex applications, much like a set of microservices.
The core concept Baraiya introduced is a clean separation between the 'brain' and the 'hands'. In this model, the 'brain' is the Large Language Model (LLM), which decides what should happen next. The 'hands' are a deterministic, durable harness that performs the actual work. This framework incorporates critical safety mechanisms such as human approval gates, idempotent steps, and recorded side effects. This design aims to prevent the LLM from improvising high-risk operations, such as restarting a production cluster.
The presentation also framed agent harnesses as 'late-bound sagas', workflows assembled by the agent at runtime. Baraiya demonstrated an SRE agent whose plan was compiled into a Conductor workflow, executed, checked, and re-planned over two loops. For engineers focused on the industrialization of AI agents, particularly those dealing with long-running, multi-step tasks with high safety requirements, this architectural pattern offers concrete reference points.