Designing Agents (The Floor Is the Frontier) — Ben Hylak, Raindrop
Aug 12, 2026 · 19:46
Ben Hylak, CTO and co-founder of Raindrop, argues that most eval advice is stuck in the chatbot era and that agents have effectively infinite issues, so the real question is which ones matter—measured by when an issue started and what share of users it hits. He reframes agent quality around raising the floor (the worst thing an agent can do, like recommending a competitor or deleting data) rather than the ceiling, and says evals belong in your repo as code tests, not prompt playgrounds, because the harness is the product. He offers three tactical lessons from Raindrop: clusters are not issues because boundaries drift and you don't control them; code mode scales to traces, letting you write classifiers and run them in a sandbox at production volume; and agents are poor at anomaly detection but good at investigating anomalies you surface deterministically, like keyword spikes. He also notes that continual learning is rare in the real world, and that your approach should depend on user…
