# How do I tell whether my AI agent is getting worse over time?

**Watch for the qualified people in your company reversing what it does more
often, and compare that against something that should not have moved.** One
signal is never enough, and a rate on its own tells you nothing.

The hard case is the agent that gets worse while every check still passes:
every line it relies on is current, every one has an owner, every output is
allowed. Nothing breaks, and it is still drifting.

## Five signals, none conclusive alone

1. **Reversals by people qualified to make them.** A deal desk lead undoing
   a price, legal rewording a term. The main signal — and you decide who
   counts as qualified, because a junior rep undoing an expert's work is
   noise.
2. **Escalations moving, in either direction.** Fewer asks can mean the agent
   has learned, or that it has stopped asking. **Falling escalations with
   rising reversals is the worst combination there is.**
3. **Near misses climbing**: things allowed only because a line happened to
   be current that day.
4. **What it writes changing shape**: longer, more certain, more absolute.
5. **Somebody saying it feels off.** Worth writing down even with nothing to
   measure it against.

## Reading them honestly

- **Compare against something that should not have changed.** A rise across
  every agent at once is about your market or your data, not this agent.
- **Group before you count.** Four bad emails with the same wrong phrase are
  one problem with one cause. Fix the line it came from rather than demoting
  the agent four times.
- **Let explained failures fade, and unexplained ones stay.** A problem
  nobody understood has not gone away because it stopped appearing.

## What to do about it

Tighten what the agent may do, alert somebody, and **let a person decide**.
Drift is an inference from a pattern, and an agent halted on an inference is
how a control becomes something people work around.

**And never turn it into a judgement about a person.** The moment reversals
become a way to grade the rep behind an agent, people stop reversing things
and the main signal disappears.

## What we have built

Reynforce records what each agent asked, relied on and was told, which is
the raw material for every signal above. **Reporting drift from it is
designed and not built yet**, and this page will say when that changes.

</what-should-an-ai-agent-be-allowed-to-promise.md> covers how permissions
open and close.