Agent workflows that work in sandbox keep breaking in prod

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

The article discusses the challenges of testing AI agent workflows in sandbox environments versus production, highlighting issues like silent failures, state management, and the inadequacy of current testing methods, and seeks community advice on best practices.

How do you actually test agent workflows before they hit prod? Building a workflow where an agent books a flight, hotel, and fires off a Gmail + SMS notification. Works fine in isolated stateless sandboxes. Then in prod it either double-books, skips the notification, or just hangs mid-flow with no useful error. The tricky part is these aren't unit-testable in any normal sense. The agent is making real decisions across 4+ external APIs, any of which can fail silently or behave differently than in test mode. Replaying a failed run is painful because state is halfway committed somewhere. Right now I'm basically running dry-run modes with mocked responses and hoping the real thing behaves the same. It usually doesn't. how others are handling this, are you building shadow environments, logging every tool call, something else? Or just accepting that some things only break in prod and building fast recovery instead?
Original Article

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