Making AI Agents Reliable

reliability_evolution:
  2024:
    - Agents failed unpredictably
    - No good testing frameworks
    - Trial and error development

  2026:
    - Predictable for bounded tasks
    - Evaluation frameworks mature
    - Systematic development practices
    - Reliability patterns established

agent_reliability_2026:
  reliable_now:
    - Multi-step workflows with defined tools
    - Information gathering and synthesis
    - Document processing pipelines
    - Structured data operations

  still_challenging:
    - Open-ended creative tasks
    - Long-running autonomous operations
    - Novel situation handling
    - Full autonomy

class BoundedAgent:
    """Agent with strict reliability constraints."""

    def __init__(self, config: AgentConfig):
        self.allowed_tools = set(config.tools)
        self.max_steps = config.max_steps
        self.timeout = config.timeout
        self.checkpoints = config.enable_checkpoints

    async def run(self, task: str) -> AgentResult:
        context = AgentContext(task=task)

        for step in range(self.max_steps):
            # Get next action with validation
            action = await self._get_validated_action(context)

            if action.type == "complete":
                return AgentResult(success=True, result=action.result)

            # Execute with guardrails
            result = await self._execute_safely(action)
            context.add_step(action, result)

            # Checkpoint for recovery
            if self.checkpoints:
                await self._checkpoint(context)

        return AgentResult(
            success=False,
            error="Max steps reached",
            partial=context.get_partial_result()
        )

agent_evaluation:
  test_types:
    unit: "Individual tool usage"
    integration: "Multi-step workflows"
    reliability: "Repeated runs, consistency"
    adversarial: "Edge cases, errors"

  metrics:
    success_rate: "% tasks completed correctly"
    consistency: "% same result on repeated runs"
    recovery: "% recovery from errors"
    efficiency: "Steps to completion"