What I Look For in Agentic Products
There is a big difference between an agent that can complete a task once and a product that can be trusted repeatedly.
When I evaluate agentic systems, I usually check five things first:
- Clear handoff boundaries between model output and deterministic code.
- Logs that make failures legible without replaying the whole run.
- Recovery paths when external tools return partial or bad data.
- Latency budgets that still feel good for a real user.
- Interfaces that communicate progress instead of pretending uncertainty does not exist.
The strongest AI products feel less like magic and more like disciplined systems design. That is usually the point where users start trusting them enough to come back.