LLM agents look impressive in demos, but problems arise when they hit production. They hallucinate, break your JSON schema, ignore system prompts, and occasionally decide they know better than your business logic.

In this talk, we’ll move beyond agentic “Hello World” and explore what it really takes to build reliable LLM agents in Java with Quarkus.

We'll examine the different options for building agentic systems, with a focus on architecture. You'll see how to secure both agent inputs and outputs with guardrails, how to make agent interactions observable, and — last but not least — the testing strategies to verify your agents’ functionality. Step by step, we'll build a production-ready LLM agent so that you can understand the different problems and their solutions.

We can't make LLM agents fully reliable. But with the tools presented in this talk, we can at least make them predictable.

Quarkus is one of the most dynamic and fast-evolving projects in the Java ecosystem today. Even six years after its initial release, it continues to push boundaries—and it already surpassed 1,000 contributors!

In this session, we’ll introduce Quarkus in Action, the latest (and coincidentally, the first) book authored by the speaker. While we can’t cover the entire book in one talk, we’ll highlight our favorite features—the ones that truly showcase Quarkus' strengths. Expect live demos of productivity powerhouses like Dev Mode, continuous testing, Dev UI, and Dev Services. We’ll have something for you whether you’re focused on a blazing-fast local development experience, seamless deployment workflows, or even the metrics influencing your cloud bills.

This talk isn’t about explaining every Quarkus feature in detail—it’s about showing you why you should give it a try. And if we succeed in inspiring you, Quarkus in Action will be the perfect next step on your learning journey!

I will be bringing 10 copies of my book Quarkus in Action to give away and sign for free at the end of the session.