Define success before you build
Gartner's June 2025 forecast names escalating costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls as the reasons agent projects fail. Each one can be measured before launch.
Write down the task, the acceptable error rate, the cost ceiling per task and the actions the agent must never take. If you cannot write these down, the project is not ready.
Build a test set from real work
Collect 100–300 real examples with the correct outcome, including the awkward edge cases. Run every change to prompts, models or tools against the full set and track accuracy, cost and latency over time.
Use automatic checks where you can: schema validation, exact matches, business-rule checks. Use model-graded or human review for the rest, and sample production traffic weekly.
Guardrails that hold in production
Set hard limits on spend, tool calls and loop depth per task. Route low-confidence cases to people. Make every irreversible action require approval.
Finally, compare against a baseline. An agent that is 90% accurate but replaces a process that was 99% accurate is not an improvement.
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