Setting Goals and Success Criteria › Setting Goals and Success Criteria

You've built an AI agent that can reason, use tools, maintain memory, make plans, and even coordinate with other agents. Now you need to determine whether it works well.

It's tempting to judge by feel. "The agent seems smart," or "It usually gets things right," or "My colleagues were impressed in the demo." But relying on intuition alone is risky. Without clear success criteria, you can't systematically improve your agent, catch regressions when you make changes, or confidently deploy it to users.

Before you write a single test or collect any feedback, you need to answer a fundamental question: What does success look like for your agent? This chapter teaches you how to define clear, measurable goals that will guide your evaluation efforts and help you build a better agent.