Your Agent Failed in Prod. Good Luck Reproducing It. - Tisha Chawla & Susheem Koul, Microsoft
Production AI agents produce costly non-reproducible failures that pass silently with clean API responses, making them undebuggable.
“Setting the temperature to zero doesn't fix a broken reasoning path. It just means the model is going to make the exact same logical error, the exact same way, at the exact same time.”
A Microsoft engineering talk argues that the core operational problem with production AI agents is non-reproducibility: a wrong tool call or bad write can succeed silently (clean 200 response, green dashboards) yet be impossible to recreate locally for debugging. It debunks the common reflex that setting temperature to zero makes agents deterministic, noting it merely repeats the same flawed reasoning. This matters because undebuggable agent failures undermine reliability guarantees for real-world, high-stakes backends.