>_ why not prompt The Agent Reliability Checklist. 13 checks to run before you ship an AI agent. Most agents fail in production for reasons on this list — not because the model wasn't smart enough. Print it, pin it, run every build through it. ① T H E L O O P The task is a narrow, well-defined loop — not open-ended. Every step has a clear success / failure signal. You've capped max steps and a token budget. ② T H E T O O L S Tools fail loudly — errors, not silent wrong answers. Tool inputs are validated / typed before they run. Dangerous actions are sandboxed or need confirmation. ③ R E L I A B I L I T Y M A T H You measured per-step success rate — not vibes. You computed compounded success across the full loop. Long chains are split into shorter, verifiable sub-tasks. ④ C O N T E X T , C O S T & S T O P Context growth is bounded — you summarize / trim old steps. You log every Thought / Action / Observation for debugging. It stops when the goal is verified — not when the model "feels" done. There's a fallback to a human when it gives up. // THE ONE NUMBER MOST TEAMS SKIP Multiply your per-step reliability across the whole loop. 0.95 20 = 0.36 — a "95% reliable" agent finishes only 36% of 20-step runs. Shorten the loop or raise per-step reliability. There's no third option. Made by Siddharth Gupta — I build AI products for a living. Building an agent that needs to actually ship? sid@groowlabs.com · guptasiddharth.com > why not prompt