Building an AI agent demo is honestly fun. You write a prompt, hook up a couple of tools, try five questions, and it nails all of them. You show your team. Everyone's impressed.
Then real people start using it, and things get weird.
They ask questions you never thought of. They paste in half a spreadsheet. They change their mind halfway through a conversation. They type "no not that one, the other one" and expect the agent to know which one. The agent that looked perfect on Friday is suddenly confidently wrong on Monday.
The thing I keep coming back to is that a demo tests the happy path, and users almost never take the happy path.
A few habits that help:
Save the weird stuff. Every time a real user breaks the agent, keep that conversation. After a few weeks you'll have a better test set than anything you could have made up.
Re-run those tests after every change. A small prompt tweak can fix one thing and quietly break three others.
Look at what the agent did, not just what it said. A polite answer can hide a wrong tool call.
Expect it to be a little different every time. If something fails once in ten runs, that's still a real problem.
None of this is fancy. It's mostly just treating your agent like software that real people will use, instead of a demo that only needs to impress once.
What's the strangest thing a real user did that broke your AI app? I'm collecting stories.
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