Evaluation Ladder: making agent reliability measurable If you can’t measure reliability, you can’t improve it. And with agentic systems, “it worked in the demo” is the most expensive lie. The trap is evaluating agents like you evaluate chat: a handful of prompts, a vibe check, maybe a rubric.

Autonomy Ladder: how agents earn the right to act People talk about “agentic AI” like autonomy is a switch: either the model can act, or it can’t. In real deployments, autonomy is a budget you spend. Every extra permission (send the email, run the command, charge the card) creates

Ops Ladder: running agents like production systems A lot of agent work focuses on prompts, planners, or “tool use.” But once an agent does anything on a schedule—or touches anything real—you’re no longer doing promptcraft. You’re doing operations. The reliability gap between “cool agent demo” and