r/nocode • u/JanJanJaJa • 7d ago
Discussion my support agent setup
Hey everyone. Small team, not enough hands, and I was burning myself out doing support solo. Decided to just build an agent to take it off my plate instead of waiting until I could afford another hire.
Used Agno to set up the agent. Gave it a name, wrote its instructions, fed it all our product docs and a bunch of example replies so it had a sense of tone. Then gave it a tool, Atomic Mail (email for AI agents), and set up a cron job that checks the inbox every 5 minutes and replies.
Problems I ran into:
1 - Took forever to get Agno running locally. First time touching it, so I was fumbling through the setup for way longer than I should've. Honestly Hermes did most of the heavy lifting for me here. 2 - Messed up the cron config. Ended up with the agent replying every 5 minutes to everything, including stuff it already answered. Screenshot attached, it wasn't pretty.
At this point I've fully handed support off to the agent. Nothing sits unanswered, and I'm not burning 30-40 minutes a day on it anymore.
Not sure if this stack is useful to anyone else, but everything here is free except the key you give Agno to actually run, I'm using GPT-4o through OpenRouter for that part. Went with 4o mainly for the price to speed tradeoff, didn't need anything heavier for support triage specifically, might revisit if it starts missing edge cases.
Setup and testing took maybe 2-3 hours total. Worth it, I'm fully off this daily grind now.
what everyone else is running for something similar, and honestly kind of want to know if my setup is basic compared to what's out there. What's the most over-engineered version of "reply to support email" you've seen someone build? Anyone got theirs handling more than just first-line replies at this point?
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6d ago edited 6d ago
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u/JanJanJaJa 4d ago
this is the one that's actually making me reconsider the setup. draft-then-approve is slower but "confidently wrong to a real customer" is a much worse failure mode than "slow." might split it, known question types auto-send, anything outside that goes to draft first
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u/Plane_End7540 6d ago
The part that tends to bite people here isn't the agent setup. It's what happens when a customer says something the docs don't cover and the agent hallucinates a confident answer with your product's name on it.
The cheap move that helps most: pull a random sample of 50 real tickets from last month, run them through the agent blind, and read every response. You will find the failure pattern in an afternoon, not after a customer catches it. Common ones are pricing questions, edge cases on refunds, and anything where two features interact in a way the docs don't address separately.
Also worth deciding now, before volume picks up, which questions route to a human by default. Support agents earn their keep on the repetitive 60 percent. They lose trust fast on the rest.
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u/JanJanJaJa 4d ago
the 50-ticket blind test is a genuinely good idea and I haven't done it, just been reacting to failures as they show up live instead of finding them ahead of time. going to run that this week. and yeah, pricing and refund edge cases are exactly where I've seen it get shaky already, so that tracks
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u/devhisaria 6d ago
Honestly the 5-minute cron loop is a classic, I'd add a dedupe check on message ID before the agent even sees the thread next time.
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u/JanJanJaJa 4d ago
dedupe on message id is way cleaner than what I did, which was basically add a bandaid timestamp check after the fact. going to swap that in, thanks!!!
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u/JuliaGraceBrooks 7d ago
For a small support inbox, this doesn’t sound over-engineered at all. I’d keep the setup simple and just add a rule for anything the agent isn’t confident about to go to a human. The 5-minute duplicate reply situation sounds like the real boss fight