An agent that dazzles in the demo and breaks in production is not an agent. It is an expensive prototype.
Most "agents" stop right there: they perform well in a controlled demo and fall apart on the first real edge case. The problem is rarely the model. It is the engineering around it: orchestration, reliable tools, limits on what the agent can do, observability and error recovery. That layer is exactly what decides whether an agent becomes a production system or stays stuck in the lab.

