Intel / video

Designing Agents (The Floor Is the Frontier) — Ben Hylak, Raindrop

Source: youtube.com
Author: AI Engineer
Date: Published Aug 12, 2026

Context

An 's most impressive demonstration can conceal the failures that damage customer trust. In his talk on agent evaluation, Ben Hylak of Raindrop, which builds tools for investigating agent behavior, argues for tracking when each problem began and what share of users it affects. Onset helps direct investigation toward recent changes; prevalence helps establish the problem's scale.

He also argues that grouping similar-looking conversations is insufficient for identifying actionable failures. A wrong price quote and a wrong refund may land in one broad category while requiring different fixes. His proposed workflow defines issues around the product's actual behavior, then measures their occurrence.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
eval — A repeatable test for AI quality — a set of tasks plus scoring — used the way software teams use test suites, because model output is too variable to judge by eyeballing.

Key quotes

“Build the thousand example eval suite everyone tells you to build, switch harnesses, and 80% of it stops meaning anything.”
AI Engineer

“the useful question is not what issues your agent has, since it will have effectively infinite issues, but which ones matter.”
Ben Hylak

“The floor is what breaks trust: recommending a competitor, deleting data, sending slop to a customer because the agent happened to have email access.”
Ben Hylak

“agents are poor at finding anomalies while being good at investigating them, so surface something deterministic like a keyword spike first and hand them that.”
Ben Hylak

“evals now belong in your repo as tests rather than in a prompt playground, because the harness is the product.”
Ben Hylak

Read the source www.youtube.com