Agents that shine in a demo often collapse the first week they meet real traffic. The failures are predictable — and preventable.
1. Silent tool errors
When a tool call fails, a naive agent treats the empty result as truth and keeps going. Wrap every tool in a typed result and make the agent branch on failure explicitly.
2. Unbounded loops
Give the agent a budget — a hard cap on steps and tokens — and a visible exit condition. An agent with no budget is an outage waiting for a trigger.
3. No human on exception
Full autonomy is a trap. Route the low-confidence and high-blast-radius cases to a person, and log every decision so the escalation is auditable.
Ship the guardrails before you ship the agent.
About the author Daniel Okafor, Staff Engineer · ShipFast
Daniel Okafor is a staff engineer at ShipFast, where he builds and operates autonomous agent infrastructure at scale.
