Right Tool, Wrong Arguments: The Agent Failure Your Evals Wave Through
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Critical analysis of agent evaluation failures is technically deep and directly relevant to AI agent orchestration.
Agent evaluation suites that only verify tool selection miss the critical failure mode of incorrect argument extraction, such as defaulting an order_id to 0 and issuing a $4,200 refund on the wrong order. A tiered validation approach—Tier 1 for deterministic schema and existence checks against the database, Tier 2 for statistical outlier detection, and Tier 3 for model-as-judge used offline only—can gate tool calls before execution. The author provides a concrete Zod-based validation layer that checks argument parsing, entity existence, and amount constraints, preventing expensive mistakes that current evals wave through.