What breaks when an LLM agent meets real users
A field guide to the failure modes that only appear once people who did not build the agent start relying on it, one per section, with what worked against each.

AI/ML Engineer in India. Core engineer on TestGrid's CoTester, an autonomous testing agent shipped across nine versions to real customers. Python, LLM agents, computer vision. I write about what breaks when an agent meets the real world.
Short version: give me something boring, repetitive or half-impossible, and I will build the thing that does it.
Not demos. CoTester runs in production across nine versions for real customers. I know what breaks when an LLM meets the real world, and how to keep it from breaking.
Intent goes in, validated and executable steps come out, and the agent checks and repairs its own work before anyone sees it. That is the pipeline I built at TestGrid.
Models and agents wrapped into secure APIs and services a team can call on day one. Your app, your platform, your CI pipeline, your internal tools. No rewrite.
Scraping, reports, document and file wrangling, data pipelines, glue between systems that were never meant to talk. If a person does it by hand every week, it can run on its own.
Computer vision, forecasting and prediction, owned from labelling the data myself to running the model in production.
Idea, prototype, production, deployment, monitoring, cost tuning. No hand-offs, and no gap between the person who designed it and the person who runs it.
Nine versions in production
An agent that turns plain-English intent into executable tests, and repairs its own output before anyone sees it.
100+ labelled UI elements
Finds interface targets from pixels when the DOM offers nothing stable to anchor to.
Pixel, OCR and LCS matching
Keeps a suite running when the interface moves underneath it, instead of failing the whole run.
2021 to now
Core engineer on CoTester. Shipped the multi-tenant agent platform, the natural-language-to-execution pipeline, self-validation and auto-correction, and the telemetry that tunes cost per conversation.
2022 to 2024
2021
Large-scale data cleaning with Apache Spark and PySpark, and logistic regression implemented from first principles.
2018 to 2022
A field guide to the failure modes that only appear once people who did not build the agent start relying on it, one per section, with what worked against each.
Why generated steps break, how self-validation catches it, and what nine versions in front of real customers actually taught.
Telemetry worth collecting, where model selection actually pays, and what to measure before optimising anything.