The hardest part of an autonomous AI agent is the unhappy path

Most demos of AI agents show you the happy path: a clean question, a tidy answer, everyone claps. The interesting engineering is everywhere else. What does your agent do when the API it depends on is down? When the model would happily keep looping, and your credit card is attached to every step? When it has no data, but is perfectly capable of writing something that looks like data anyway? I built an autonomous agent for a domain where those questions are not academic, and getting the unhappy…