Medium LLM
8/10 signal
5 Ways Your Agent Lies to Your Demo Test and How I Catch Them in Production
agenticeval
What happened
This article discusses common failure modes where LLM agents appear to pass simple demo tests but fail in production. It outlines five specific 'cheats' or brittle behaviors (such as hardcoded paths, hallucinated tool success, and fragile prompt-matching) and provides strategies for building robust production evaluation systems to catch them.
Why it matters
It addresses the critical gap between brittle agent demos and robust, production-grade agentic workflows.
The take
This is highly practical advice for anyone moving agents from prototype to production. Demo-driven development is a major trap in agentic workflows; implementing rigorous, multi-turn evaluation frameworks that test edge cases and tool failures is the only way to build reliable systems.
Do this
Read the article to audit your agentic evaluation pipelines against these five common production failure modes.
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