Testing autonomous agents (Or: how I learned to stop worrying and embrace chaos)
Look, we’ve spent the last 18 months building production AI systems, and we’ll tell you what keeps us up at night — and it’s not whether the model can answer questions. That’s table stakes now. What haunts us is the mental image of an agent autonomously approving a six-figure vendor contract at 2 a.m. because someone typo’d a config file. We’ve moved past the era of “ChatGPT wrappers” (thank God), but the industry still treats autonomous agents like they’re just chatbots with API access. They’re not. When you give an AI system the ability to take actions without human confirmation, you’re crossing a fundamental threshold. You’re not building a helpful assistant anymore — you’re building something closer to an employee. And that changes everything about how we need to engineer these systems. The autonomy problem nobody talks about Here’s what’s wild: We’ve gotten really good at making models that *sound* confident. But confidence and reliability aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is where production systems go to die. We learned this the …
