What does it actually take to run AI agents reliably in production? Hendrix Liu, co-founder of Respan (formerly Keywords AI, YC W24), joins Shane and Abhi to break it down. Respan is a one-stop LLM engineering platform — an AI gateway, observability, evals, and prompt optimization in one place — used by teams like AlphaSense, Retell AI, DataCurve, and Mem0. Hendrix shares the three failure modes every agent team runs into (silent failures, reliability outages, and runaway cost), and the techniques to catch each one: fallback routing across 1,000+ models when a provider goes down, online evals that flag hallucinations before a customer does, and spend limits at the per-key, per-model, and per-customer level. You'll also hear the counterintuitive origin story — Respan started as a model router in 2023, years before routing was cool, then pivoted to observability when nobody wanted another black box — plus a live demo of their Scratch-style evaluators, an honest take on build vs. buy for the LLM stack, and why most teams chasing an eval "certification" are really just after a compliance sticker. Recorded live on AI Agents Hour, a weekly livestream by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Mondays 12PM Pacific. 📚 ABOUT RESPAN Respan: https://respan.ai Respan on X: https://x.com/RespanAI Hendrix Liu on X: https://x.com/HendrixLiu29208 Hendrix Liu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hendrix-liu-7a015822b Respan integrates with Mastra — teams already run Mastra agents through Respan today. 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Mastra on X: https://x.com/mastra_ai Mastra Discord: https://mastra.ai/community/discord Mastra GitHub: https://github.com/mastra-ai Learn Mastra: https://mastra.ai/learn Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/books/principles-of-building-ai-agents Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/books/patterns-of-building-ai-agents WHAT IS MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you're a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 What to fix first 00:24 Welcome — Hendrix from Respan 00:57 What is Respan? 01:38 The gateway: their first product 03:41 The journey: gateway to observability to evals 04:40 Bootstrapping to the tier-one list 06:09 Three failure modes: silent, reliability, cost 07:16 Techniques: fallbacks & online evals 08:25 Build vs. buy for the LLM stack 10:00 Demo: the gateway, limits & tracing 11:18 Scratch-style evaluators 13:11 Evals 101: how to actually get good 14:22 The compliance trap 15:12 The Mastra integration 15:27 Outro