The metrics that actually keep work in AI agents honest
The numbers that matter here are about completion quality and operator burden, not total turns or model cleverness. Good teams look at success on representative jobs, intervention rate on irreversible actions, and how quickly they can explain a bad run to another engineer.
Three metrics worth pressure-testing:
- task success rate on representative workflows
- human intervention rate on irreversible actions
- time-to-resolution compared with the manual baseline
Source material behind the scorecard:
- OpenAI Agents SDK for JavaScript: openai.github.io/openai-agents-js/
A clean look at agents, handoffs, guardrails, and tracing in one place.
- Model Context Protocol introduction: modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction
Worth reading so tool access and context plumbing stop feeling hand-wavy.
If your team has a sharper dashboard, share the metric definitions and the decisions they actually change. That is what makes numbers reusable.