Every team shipping an agent has the same meeting. Someone asks "is it ready?" and the room splits. One person saw a great demo. Another watched it invent a refund policy an hour ago. The argument runs in circles because nobody agreed what "ready" means, so the loudest opinion wins and the agent ships on a vibe.
Making an AI agent production-ready is not a moment of confidence. It is a bar you write down before you build, then measure against. This post is about that bar: why agents need a different one than the services you already ship, and how to define it so "is it ready?" becomes a number instead of an argument.
Why "production-ready" breaks for agents
For a normal service, "production-ready" is settled. Correct output for valid input, handles errors, meets a latency target, has tests and a rollback. You know the shape of done. An agent breaks three of those assumptions at once:
It is non-deterministic. The same input can produce different output, so "correct" becomes "acceptably right, often enough."
