Road to NODES 2026 | Stop AI Agent Hallucinations: 5 Techniques + Production Patterns

This workshop is designed to show you why AI agents hallucinate - booking 15 guests into a 10-person room, fabricating statistics when the data doesn't exist, or picking the wrong tool out of 29 options - and how five research-backed techniques can be combined to fix these as the structural problems they are, rather than prompt engineering issues. The workshop includes hands-on exercises in which you will implement GraphRAG to replace vector-based similarity guessing with precise entity relationships, significantly reducing fabricated statistics. You will build semantic tool selection that filters large toolsets down to only the relevant options, dramatically reducing token usage, and construct multi-agent Executor-Validator-Critic swarms that catch the large majority of fabrications before they reach a user. You will also apply neurosymbolic guardrails enforced through lifecycle hooks agents cannot bypass, and use agent steering to guide agents toward self-correction instead of hard failure. Each technique is demonstrated with live code and before-and-after metrics. By the end of the session, you will have working Python implementations for all five techniques, plus exposure to a final module on production deployment. You will leave with a decision framework for choosing the right technique for your use case, and an open-source repository you can adapt to your own domain. No AWS account or cloud costs are required - sandboxes are provided.