What's in the Box? Distinguishing Acceptable Traces from Unacceptable Ones

AI agents in production must balance competing objectives such as quality, cost, and latency from different business stakeholders. A proposed framework addresses this by translating scattered requirements into a single, optimizable evaluation score. This method defines an "acceptable" operating envelope, or "box," using thresholds, penalties, and priority weights for various metrics. By scoring agent configurations against this box, development teams can make informed trade-offs and ensure agents stay within business constraints, turning abstract goals into a deployable system.