Field notes on AI agent quality.

OpenClaw makes deploying an agent easy. Testing it is another matter. How adversarial testing catches the multi-turn, fabrication, scope, and unauthorized-action failures before your users do.

The average agent fails half its adversarial conversations, and breaks between turn three and turn five. Here are the three most common failures, and what the agents that score well do differently.

Ground truth testing breaks the moment a user asks something without one right answer. The clean-input, multi-turn, non-determinism, and maintenance problems, and what works better.

If you generate the dataset, you own the ground truth. The seven categories of adversarial questions, what the scorecard shows, and how the pattern covers CRM, ticketing, knowledge base, logs, and messaging.

Output scoring, production monitoring, and adversarial testing. Each catches a different class of failure, and the third layer is the one most teams are missing.

Every agent works in the demo. Turn one is fine, turn three is where cracks appear, turn five is where failures compound. Why the builder is the worst person to test the agent.