Why Production AI Agents Fail in Ways You Won’t See Coming (Part 1)

My practical fixes for costly blind spots It was PM on a Tuesday when Marcus, a senior engineer I used to work with, dropped me a Slack message. His company’s finance team had just asked him: “Can you explain this AWS/OpenAI charge? $48,200. This month.” The agent had been live for three weeks. It passed all their staging tests. Ninety‑two percent on their internal eval suite. The team had high‑fived the launch. Then Marcus opened the logs and started scrolling. He found three customers whose agents had gotten stuck in loops over 200 iterations each. The agent had no idea it was stuck.