AI agents usually do not fail with a dramatic crash. They fail quietly through wrong tool calls, invalid arguments, retry storms, looping behavior, and weak recovery. This article explains where the agent loop breaks and how to design traces, guardrails, limits, checkpointing, idempotency, and evals that catch incidents before users do.
Prompting can improve a single run, but it cannot prove that an agent workflow is reliable. This article explains how traces, scorecards, offline evals, and online monitoring turn agent quality into an engineering discipline.
Most bad agent experiences come from bad stopping decisions. Learn how to design stop logic in code with explicit exit states, tool signals, step limits, and traceable runtime policies.
Most agent failures are not prompt failures. They happen because teams misunderstand the control loop the system is actually running. This article breaks the loop into its real runtime parts and shows why that changes debugging, reliability, and production behavior.