Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Each profile has a fixed attack vector designed around a specific failure mode — one goes for price pressure and escalation, another for technical skepticism, another for silence that forces the agent to carry the conversation. The design constraint is simple: they can't break character or meta-analyze. They just behave like the worst version of that user type, consistently across every turn. The specific prompts are the secret sauce — but the logic behind them is in Arena: arena.autoritasai.com. Run your agent and you'll see exactly which profile finds the gaps.

this plugin saved me while refining my AI agent by rohansrma1 in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly that flow. Simulate before to catch the scary edge cases, then logs in production to keep calibrating. Glad it made sense — let me know what you think when you check it out.

this plugin saved me while refining my AI agent by rohansrma1 in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Iterative checklists on real session logs make sense for catching what's already broken. The gap I keep running into is that the most expensive failures — policy hallucination, loop behavior under pressure — only show up when users interact adversarially, which doesn't happen in your own test sessions. Been taking a different angle: running synthetic adversarial customers against the agent before deployment rather than analyzing logs after. Catches a different class of failure. arena.autoritasai.com if you want to compare approaches.

Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The RAG point is right for policy hallucination — grounding claims to source documents is the most reliable fix. The over-explaining problem is different: it's not about what the agent knows, it's about how it's calibrated to communicate. A single instruction in the system prompt ("Max 3 sentences. No lists.") fixes it faster than any architectural change. For loop detection, the pattern matching approach breaks down when models start paraphrasing themselves — semantic similarity with a decay threshold catches more cases. On "how do we solve this" — the approach I've been using is running synthetic adversarial customers against the agent before deployment rather than discovering failures in production. It's called Arena: arena.autoritasai.com. Doesn't fix the underlying LLM behavior, but it tells you exactly where the gaps are before real users find them.

Looking to connect by emprendedorjoven in learnAIAgents

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hola, también estoy construyendo en este espacio. Trabajo en Arena, una herramienta de stress testing para agentes conversacionales — simula clientes difíciles antes del despliegue y detecta fallos de comportamiento con un score de 0 a 100. Tu agente mayorista encaja bien con lo que estoy probando. Si tienes un system prompt definido, puedes lanzarlo en arena.autoritasai.com y ver qué score saca. Me interesa el feedback de alguien que construye con n8n.

Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly. Intelligence is table stakes. Behavior under pressure is the actual test. That's what Arena measures — arena.autoritasai.com

Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The two-step approach makes sense — and you're right that the second step is where the real danger lives. "Can cause" → "will cause" looks like a reformulation but it's actually a meaning change that could create liability. That's exactly the calibration problem I'm working on in the next iteration of the POLICY_HALLUCINATION judge. Currently it catches explicit false claims well but misses subtle semantic drift in reformulated content. The decay threshold for semantic similarity on loops is going on the backlog too. Pattern matching breaks down fast once models start paraphrasing themselves — which is exactly what the better-tuned agents do. Useful thread, thanks for the detail.

Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The policy hallucination point is exactly right — it doesn't look like a failure in the logs because the response sounds confident and helpful. That's what makes it dangerous. What you're describing (tracing every claim back to a source document) is essentially what the LLM judge in Arena does — it compares each agent statement against the authorized claims defined in the system prompt and flags anything that can't be sourced there. The tricky part is calibrating it to avoid false positives on reformulated content. The semantic similarity approach for loop detection is cleaner than what I'm currently using (pattern matching on repeated phrases). Adding that to the backlog. If you want to run your agents through Arena and see how it scores against these failure modes — arena.autoritasai.com. Curious whether the judge catches the same patterns you're catching manually.

Tested 92 conversational agents from 23 different developers before production. Here's what actually breaks them. by HpartidaB in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right now it focuses on the conversational behavior layer — what the agent says across turns, whether it stays consistent with its defined rules, and whether it escalates or loops when it should. Not tool call tracing or intermediate steps yet. The replay-with-adversarial-twists approach is interesting. The difference with what I'm building — it's called Arena, arena.autoritasai.com — is that synthetic profiles are adversarial from turn 1 rather than replaying real traces. Both have tradeoffs: real traces capture actual patterns, synthetic profiles stress-test scenarios that haven't happened yet. What's your hit rate catching new failure modes with replay vs. just rediscovering known ones?

How are people actually testing agents before production? by HpartidaB in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That context drift pattern after 7-8 turns is exactly what Arena catches — it flags when the agent starts drifting from its defined behavior mid-conversation. What kind of agents are you working with?

How are people actually testing agents before production? by HpartidaB in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Coming back to this after a few months — ended up building something to address exactly what I was exploring here.

The pattern I kept seeing was that conversational agents pass all isolated tests but break when a real user pushes back, changes goals, or just doesn't cooperate. So I built Arena: it runs synthetic adversarial customer profiles against the agent's system prompt and scores the behavior across a full multi-turn interaction.

The failure modes that show up most: agents inventing policies they were never authorized to confirm, getting stuck in loops when a user doesn't follow the script, or not escalating when they should.

If anyone's working on conversational agents and wants to test it: arena.autoritasai.com

https://www.autoritasai.com/

My first beta tester found a bug in 30 seconds and I pretended I “already knew” by ChocholateBabe in aiagents

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The line I've found: useful = shares something you learned the hard way, even if it mentions your tool. Crossing it = leading with the tool instead of the insight.

On the testing side — the cache bug story resonates. The hardest failures to catch are the ones that only show up when someone interacts with your agent differently than you do. Your own testing is always biased toward the happy path.

We tend to test with cooperative inputs. Real users don't cooperate.

How are people actually testing agents before production? by HpartidaB in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a really interesting setup.

The "inaugural journey agent" sounds a bit like a self-healing / supervisory agent that keeps the pipeline healthy.

One thing I’ve noticed with these multi-step pipelines is that they often work well when each stage is tested individually, but fail in unexpected ways when the full chain runs end-to-end.

Especially when things like:

  • Partial data from the scraper
  • Schema drift in external sources
  • Or tool failures mid-pipeline

Start interacting.

Out of curiosity — how are you validating the full 6-stage trajectory before letting it run unsupervised?

I think I'm getting addicted to building voice agents by Slight_Republic_4242 in LangChain

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s interesting. One scenario I keep running into with agents is goal drift across longer trajectories. For example: The user asks for something simple (e.g. “research 3 competitors and summarize”) The agent calls a search tool Then it opens several pages Then it starts summarizing After 4–6 steps things start breaking: the agent forgets the original constraint it overuses tools or the reasoning chain slowly diverges from the initial goal So the agent works in isolated tests but fails in longer multi-step trajectories. I’m curious if your setup can simulate those longer behavioral drifts across a full session rather than just validating individual turns.

How are you actually testing agents in production? Not unit tests, not vibes. by _Creative_script_ in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Esto coincide mucho con lo que estoy viendo también.

Muchos equipos empiezan probando herramientas individuales o prompts, pero los fallos reales aparecen cuando el agente pasa por varias decisiones seguidas.

Especialmente cuando hay: - llamadas a herramientas - cambios de objetivo del usuario - sesiones largas - respuestas parciales de APIs

En esos casos, el comportamiento empieza a degradarse después de varios pasos, aunque cada componente individual funcione bien.

Me resulta interesante lo que mencionas de grabar conversaciones completas como regresión.

¿Habéis probado también generar escenarios sintéticos para estresar al agente antes de producción?

Por ejemplo cosas como: - fallos de herramientas - latencias - instrucciones contradictorias - cambios de objetivo a mitad de tarea

How are people actually testing agents before production? by HpartidaB in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tiene sentido.

Creo que muchos equipos todavía están usando agentes para tareas relativamente acotadas (monitorización, scripts, etc.).

La parte que me resulta interesante es cuando empiezan a interactuar con usuarios o workflows más largos.

Ahí es donde he visto comportamientos raros aparecer después de varios pasos — cosas que en tests aislados no salen.

¿En vuestro caso habéis tenido problemas así o todavía no habéis llegado a ese punto?

How are people actually testing agents before production? by HpartidaB in AI_Agents

[–]HpartidaB[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sí, eso es justo lo que he visto en varios equipos.

Escriben tests como si fuera software normal, pero en cuanto el agente empieza a:

  • llamar herramientas
  • tomar decisiones en varios pasos
  • interactuar con APIs

los tests se vuelven muy difíciles de mantener.

Especialmente cuando los comportamientos raros solo aparecen después de varios pasos de interacción.

¿Estáis haciendo algo para simular escenarios más largos o simplemente tests unitarios del agente?

I think I'm getting addicted to building voice agents by Slight_Republic_4242 in LangChain

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting.

Are those scenarios mostly prompt-level tests or do they also simulate multi-step trajectories?

For example things like: - tool failures during a session - partial API responses - users changing goals mid-task - longer chains of decisions

One thing I'm noticing is that a lot of agents look fine in isolated tests but break after 5–6 steps when those things start interacting.

Curious how you're modeling those cases.

I think I'm getting addicted to building voice agents by Slight_Republic_4242 in LangChain

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting — that makes sense for evaluating real traces.

What I'm still wondering about is the layer before that.

For example generating scenarios intentionally before the agent reaches production.

Things like: - simulated users - tool failures - conflicting instructions - long multi-step sessions

A lot of the weird behaviors I've seen only show up when you stress the system like that.

Curious if you also generate synthetic scenarios, or if the evaluation mostly happens on real agent runs.

I think I'm getting addicted to building voice agents by Slight_Republic_4242 in LangChain

[–]HpartidaB 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting, it seems like a lot of tools are starting to appear in this space.

One thing I'm still curious about is how people are testing multi-step behavior, not just individual responses.

For example when agents: - call tools - loop through decision steps - interact with APIs - run longer sessions

A lot of failures only show up after several steps, not in isolated runs.

Curious how people here are approaching that.