Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’): Agentic AI Guide (2026)

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📑 Table of Contents

Planning & Reasoning Architectures

1 The Planning Problem in Agentic AI: Goals, Tasks, and Constraints
2 ReAct: Reason + Act Loops That Actually Work
3 Tree-of-Thoughts: Exploring Multiple Reasoning Paths
4 Reflexion: Self-Critique, Feedback, and Iterative Improvement
5 Plan-and-Execute Architecture: Separation of Strategy and Action
6 Hierarchical Task Decomposition: From Intent to Subtasks
7 Search, Heuristics, and Best-First Planning for LLM Agents
8 Tool Selection Policies: When to Call Tools vs Think
9 Failure Modes in Planning: Loops, Drift, and Over-Planning

Memory Systems for Agents

10 Memory in Agents: The Missing Layer Between Chatbots and Autonomy
11 Working Memory: Context Windows, Scratchpads, and State
12 Long-Term Memory Patterns: Profiles, Preferences, and Facts
13 Vector Memory with Embeddings: Retrieval That Feels Like Recall
14 Episodic Memory: Storing Experiences and Learning from Them
15 Memory Quality: Relevance, Recency, and Truthfulness
16 Memory Write Policies: What to Save, When to Save, and Consent
17 RAG vs Memory: Where Knowledge Should Live
18 Observability & Debugging Memory: Logs, Traces, and Evaluation

Tool Use & API Orchestration

19 Tool-Using Agents: From Chat to Action (Safely)
20 Function Calling & JSON Schemas That Don’t Break
21 API Orchestration Patterns: Fan-out, Fan-in, and Pipelines
22 Retries, Timeouts, and Idempotency for Agent Actions
23 Permissions & Policy Enforcement for Tool Calls
24 Tool Output Summarization: Keep Context Small, Keep Decisions Sharp
25 Human-in-the-Loop: Confirmations and Approval Flows
26 Building a Minimal Tooling Layer: Tool Registry, Router, and Tracing

Multi-Agent Systems

27 Multi-Agent Systems: When One Agent Isn’t Enough
28 Roles, Specialization, and Agent Teams (Manager–Worker Pattern)
29 Communication Protocols: Messages, Shared State, and Contracts
30 Coordination Strategies: Parallelism, Voting, and Debate
31 Conflict Resolution: Handling Disagreements Between Agents
32 Multi-Agent Failure Modes: Collusion, Loops, and Amplified Errors
33 Tooling for Multi-Agent: Shared Memory, Traces, and Runbooks
34 Design Exercise: Build a Research Team of Agents

Autonomous Decision Systems

35 Autonomous Decision Systems: From Suggestions to Decisions
36 Decision Under Uncertainty: Confidence, Risk, and Verification
37 Reward Models and Utility Functions (Without the Math Pain)
38 Policy Networks vs Rule Engines: Choosing the Right Brain
39 Goal Management: Priorities, Deadlines, and Trade-offs
40 Decision Logging and Accountability (Why Audits Matter)
41 Bandits and Exploration: Let Agents Learn Safer Choices Over Time
42 Decision Systems Case Study: Autonomous Customer Support Triage

Agent Frameworks & Libraries

43 Agent Frameworks Overview: What They Solve (and What They Don’t)
44 LangGraph Fundamentals: Modeling Agents as State Machines
45 CrewAI Style Teams: Roles, Tasks, and Collaborative Runs
46 AutoGen Concepts: Agent Conversations with Clear Termination
47 Semantic Kernel: Skills, Planners, and Enterprise Integrations
48 Framework Selection Guide: Pick the Simplest Thing That Works
49 Production Setup: Tracing, Evaluation, and Cost Controls
50 Migration Pattern: From DIY Agent to Framework-Based Agent

RAG in Autonomous Systems

51 RAG for Agents: Why Retrieval Changes Behavior
52 Indexing Strategy: Chunking, Metadata, and Refresh Cycles
53 Retrieval Tuning: Top-K, Filters, Re-Ranking, and Thresholds
54 Agentic RAG: Retrieval as a Tool in a Planning Loop
55 Grounded Generation: Citing Sources and Preventing Hallucinations
56 Security in RAG: Access Control, Tenant Isolation, and Redaction
57 RAG Evaluation: Measuring Answer Grounding and Retrieval Quality
58 Case Study: Build a Policy-Aware Support Agent with RAG

Evaluation & Safety in Agentic AI

59 Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’)
60 Test Sets for Agents: Scenarios, Edge Cases, and Regression Suites
61 Safety Guardrails: Content Policies, Red Teams, and Refusal Design
62 Prompt Injection Defense: How Agents Get Tricked
63 Hallucination Control: Grounding, Verification, and Uncertainty
64 Sandboxing and Safe Execution for Code-Running Agents
65 Observability for Agents: Traces, Spans, and Failure Debugging
66 Safety Case Study: Building a Finance Assistant with Strict Guardrails

Deployment & Scaling Agents

67 Deploying Agents: Reference Architecture for Production
68 Latency Engineering: Fast Agents Without Bad Answers
69 Cost Controls: Token Budgets, Tool Budgets, and Model Routing
70 Scaling Infrastructure: Queues, Workers, and Async Agent Runs
71 Secrets and Key Management for Tooling and LLM Providers
72 Monitoring & Alerting: Detecting Cost Spikes and Failure Storms
73 Versioning Prompts and Tools: Safe Rollouts with Feature Flags
74 Deployment Case Study: Shipping a Support Agent End-to-End

Capstone Projects & Real-World Systems

75 Capstone Overview: How to Build an Agentic System Like a Product
76 Project 1: Autonomous Research Assistant (RAG + Tool Use)
77 Project 2: Customer Support Copilot (Triage + Draft + Escalation)
78 Project 3: Autonomous DevOps Assistant (Runbooks + Safe Actions)
79 Project 4: Multi-Agent Content Pipeline (Writer + Editor + SEO Reviewer)
80 Project 5: Agentic Analytics Assistant (Queries + Explanations + Dashboards)
81 Capstone Evaluation: Scoring Rubric and Demo Checklist
82 Going Beyond: Hardening Your Agent for Real Users

Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’)

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Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’)

Why evaluation is hard

Agents do multi-step work, so failures can be subtle: wrong tool called, missing constraint, or incorrect assumption.

Core metrics

Task success rate
Tool-call accuracy
Hallucination/ungrounded claim rate
Latency and cost
User correction rate

Test Sets for Agents: Scenarios, Edge Cases, and Regression Suites

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Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’)

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🎓 Want Live Training?

Agent Evaluation: What to Measure (Beyond ‘Seems Good’)

Why evaluation is hard

Core metrics

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