LLMagentsinproduction:failuremodesthedemosskip

Demos emphasise the happy path. In production, a large share of incidents comes from malformed inputs, stale retrieval context, and tool errors that were never mapped to user-visible behaviour.

We treat six areas as mandatory on any agent roadmap: deterministic routing where feasible, explicit tool contracts, an evaluation set that grows with traffic, per-session cost limits, PII-aware logging, and a human escalation path that is tested as often as the model path.

If those items are not resourced on the plan, the deliverable is a prototype, not a production channel.