This is going to be a controversial take, but I stand by it. Feel free to argue in the comments.
My stance
I know this will not be popular with everyone, and that is fine. I would rather be honest than agreeable. The bot development space has too many people repeating conventional wisdom without questioning whether it still applies.
The messy middle
Getting started is easy. Getting to production-ready is hard. The difference is in the details that nobody blogs about because they are boring. But boring is what keeps systems running at 3 AM.
The nuance
Of course it is not that simple. There are legitimate scenarios where the opposite approach makes sense. If you are in a highly regulated industry, or working at enterprise scale, or dealing with sensitive data — adjust accordingly. But for the 80% of us in the normal case, what I described above is the way to go.
I will update this article as things change — and in this space, things change fast. Bookmark it and check back. More related content at ai7bot.com, agntai.net. Official references: Hacker News, OpenAI Platform.