Passing Unit Tests Doesn't Mean an AI Agent Is Ready for Production
Engineers often treat green test suites as proof of readiness, but autonomous AI agents can still cause damage through their choices. Unlike conventional software, an agent's execution path varies with its environment, tools, and mid-task information, so judgment must be tested alongside outputs. Individually working components may still fail when an agent sequences them poorly, such as retrying transactions into duplicates or overwriting records. Pradeep of BotGauge recommends asserting properties of outcomes, like respecting permissions and escalating when needed, rather than fixed action sequences. He also urges deliberate adversarial testing of six failure modes, plus chaos testing of the agent's environment, before granting production access.
