the agent demos look amazing because nobody films the 90% that's error handling

i keep seeing slick agent demos and then i go back to my own work and remember what building these actually is. the demo is the agent doing the task once, cleanly, on a happy path someone set up. production is everything that happens when the path isn't happy. my agents spend most of their code on things that never appear in a demo. retrying when an API times out. checking the output is even the right shape before passing it along. stopping itself when it's about to loop forever. logging enough that i can figure out what went wrong at 2am. the actual "intelligence" is maybe a tenth of it, the rest is plumbing to stop one bad step from poisoning the whole run. the other thing nobody shows is that agents fail silently in a way scripts don't. a broken script throws an error. a broken agent confidently does the wrong thing and tells you it succeeded. so i've ended up building checks around the agent that are almost as much work as the agent itself. i'm not down on them, the ones that work save me real time. but i've stopped trusting any demo that doesn't show what happens when a step fails. what's your ratio of actual agent logic to guardrails around it?