The Gap Between Agent Demos and Agent Production

The Gap Between Agent Demos and Agent Production Watch enough agent demos and you'll notice a pattern. They work great in controlled environments. Give them a clear task, a fresh context window, a well-defined goal. The agent produces impressive results. Then you deploy them. And they drift. Not catastrophically. Subtly. The fundraising agent that followed MEDDIC qualification perfectly in testing starts skipping discovery questions after a few weeks. The code review agent that caught security issues reliably begins missing edge cases. The data transformation agent that produced clean outputs 95% of the time suddenly hits 70%. The demos never show this part. Why Agents Drift It's not the model degrading. It's not prompt decay. It's that agents were never measured systematically in the first place. Most agent development follows a demo-driven cycle: Write agent instructions Test manually on 3-5 examples Tweak when it fails Ship when it "works" Hope for the best This is like shipping cod