Everyone is shipping AI agents right now. Almost no one is testing them — and that is the whole problem.

A demo agent and a production agent are different animals. The demo works because you walked it down the happy path. Production breaks on the paths you never imagined.

A real example from my own work: a support assistant correctly handed a conversation to a human when someone wrote "I want to talk to a person" in Spanish — but not in English, because one phrase was missing from a rule. Every automated test passed. It only surfaced when I ran real conversations through it.

That is the gap the "agents will replace everything" wave keeps skipping. The hard part was never making an agent act. It is making it: • say "I don't know" instead of guessing, • hand control back to a human at the right moment, • and prove, with tests, that it still behaves when the input gets strange.

Autonomy is cheap. Trustworthy autonomy is the real engineering.

Before you let an AI agent near real users or real data — what is the first thing you check?

The Spanish vs English handoff bug is such a good example. Every test passes until a real user shows up.