When Building an AI Agent, the Journey Matters as Much as the Destination

A practical framework for evaluating trajectories, tool use, and process, not just the final answer.

Originally published on Medium.

1. Introduction

I am sure almost everyone reading this has tried to build an AI agent by now. For the POC, after some trial and error, it works, and you can demo it, everyone is impressed. You have tested it manually and it works, mostly.

But thinking in terms of software engineering, you know that conventionally the code had integration tests, unit tests, etc. I am sure it did not cover everything, but it gave me baseline confidence. For AI agents, the story is very different.