Agent reliability is not a side metric once the tool enters production. If an agent regresses, behaves inconsistently, or requires constant supervision, the human becomes the real orchestration layer again. At that point the product may still be impressive, but it is not saving much work.
Enterprise buyers should evaluate agents like operational systems. Can the team reproduce a result, compare versions, restrict actions, recover from errors, and understand why behavior changed? Can a user pause, inspect, and roll back work without heroic effort? These controls are less exciting than a new capability demo, but they determine whether the agent becomes trusted infrastructure or another experiment that creates review burden. Reliability turns autonomy from a novelty into something a team can plan around.
Grey Haven read: Agent reliability is now a customer-facing product feature. Once a user has to supervise every action because regressions are unpredictable, the agent has shifted labor rather than reduced it.
Reader guidance: Treat the item as a signal about operating readiness rather than headline momentum. The useful question is which control, workflow, or evidence requirement must be strengthened before the same pattern reaches a production system with customers, regulators, or internal teams depending on it.
Operator guidance: Require versioned evaluations, rollback paths, and user-visible failure recovery before expanding agent scope. Watch unexplained behavior changes after model updates, prompt edits, cache changes, or new tool permissions.
Source/provenance: Grey Haven Signal update linear-ASM-2-1, based on the existing backfill draft and manifest record; no source URL was present in the manifest.
