Agentic workloads break three software testing assumptions, and teams must adapt

Agentic workloads break three assumptions of traditional enterprise software: jobs finish quickly, retries are free, and identical inputs give identical outputs.

Automated agent runs can accumulate hidden retry costs, produce structurally valid but wrong results, and fail in ways that cannot be reproduced without detailed traces.

The article recommends defining acceptance criteria in advance, capping attempts, and recording inputs, model versions, costs and approvals for every run.