Beyond evaluation leaderboards: what makes an agent trustworthy in production?
Benchmarks find blind spots—but they rarely capture cost, uptime, operations, or human-in-the-loop review.
When capability deltas shrink, momentum shifts toward engineering that ships end-to-end: context budgeting, tool contracts, telemetry, traceability.
Three questions still matter during vendor selection: can it degrade gracefully? can behaviors be pinned as regression suites? were permissions baked in—not bolted on after launch?