Agent Reliability Forge

Summary

Applied the full 6-phase Reliability Forge to your customer support agent. Produced a formal Reliability Contract, prioritized Failure Mode Catalog, evaluation strategy, telemetry requirements, self-correction design, and a clear Production Readiness Gate status.

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1. Reliability Contract (v1.0)

Guarantees

• Never invents order status, refund eligibility, or policy details. All factual claims must come from tool results.
• Always cites the specific tool output used for any factual claim.
• Escalates to human when confidence drops below calibrated threshold or user expresses frustration twice.

Refusals

• Never processes refunds or account changes without explicit human confirmation for amounts > $50.
• Never shares internal notes or other customers’ data.

Success Criteria

• ≥ 92% resolution rate without escalation on golden set
• Silent failure rate (wrong but confident answer) < 1.5%
• p95 end-to-end latency ≤ 12s
• Average cost per resolved ticket ≤ $0.18

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2. Failure Mode Catalog (High/Critical only)

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3. Evaluation Strategy

• Golden set: 120 real + synthetic tickets
• Adversarial probes for every High/Critical mode above
• Continuous: Shadow 10% of live traffic, weekly scoring against production + human labels

4. Required Telemetry

Every run must emit: run_id, contract_version, outcome_class (Success/Degraded/Failed/Escalated), tool_calls sequence, token/cost metrics, degradation signals.

5. Self-Correction Design

• Bound retries to 2 attempts with tightened constraints
• Circuit breaker after 3 consecutive failures of the same class
• Controlled escalation package that includes full tool history and contract version

6. Production Readiness Gate

Verdict: Not yet production-ready. Two operational items remain. Once those are closed, the agent can be authorized.

Next steps

1. Implement the kill-switch and assign on-call ownership
2. Schedule the first continuous evaluation job
3. Re-run the Production Readiness Gate
4. Authorize production traffic only after all items are green