Blog · Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Why most agent demos fail in production, and the evaluation that catches it
Agents that look impressive in a demo break on tool errors, long contexts and ambiguous instructions. A practical evaluation set catches all three before your users do.
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The short version
Three failure modes account for most production incidents: the agent trusts a failed tool call, it loses the plot in a long context, or it guesses when the instruction is ambiguous.
An evaluation set with 50 to 100 traced cases, each with a pass condition, catches all three. We show how to write cases from real logs and how to score them without a human in the loop.
The Agentic AI Engineer course builds this evaluation harness in module 5 and uses it to grade the capstone.