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Q56Premium

Walk me through how you'd debug a production agent that's failing 20% of the time.

Hard / Curveball

DebuggingProductionObservabilityEvaluation

Asked at Datadog · Sierra · Google

How to Answer

"Structured debugging:

  • (1)Segment failures — by task type, user segment, time of day, input length. Is it 20% across the board or 80% on one category?
  • (2)Read the traces — pull 20 failed traces. Classify: tool error? Model hallucination? Timeout? Wrong tool selection? Context overflow?
  • (3)Find the common pattern — usually 1-2 root causes explain 80% of failures.
  • (4)Fix and verify — fix the root cause, replay the failed traces, confirm they now pass.
  • (5)Add regression tests — add the failed cases to the golden set so this never regresses.
  • (6)Monitor — set an alert on failure rate. The meta-insight: the observability you built before production is what makes this debugging possible in 1 hour instead of 1 week."

The deep dive — diagrams, tradeoff tables, and the follow-up trap

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