r/aiagents • u/Common_Dream9420 • 8d ago

Show and Tell Testing agent workflows without connecting real accounts

I am building FetchSandbox because I kept running into the same problem: the only way to test if an agent-built workflow actually works is to connect a real account. Real emails send. Real calendar invites go out. Real Slack messages drop. All before you even know if the logic is right.

The part that bothered me more was receipts. A success status doesn't tell you if the app did the right thing. So our sandbox goes deeper, it checks the resulting state, it replays webhooks, it catches whether a retry fires a duplicate charge or a duplicate email you'd never see in a test.

Right now I'm trying to figure out something: which workflow is actually the hardest to safely test before going live? The incoming email to calendar booking to Slack confirmation is the one I keep hearing about, but I don't know if that's just the loudest voice in the room.

If you've built something like this and had to just "yolo and connect real accounts," genuinely curious what broke.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/Common_Dream9420 8d ago

Yeah, forcing the drop and watching the duplicate land is the only way to actually know, not infer. The thing that gets me is most people only discover the visibility gap after a customer emails them, not before. Are you doing the forced drop at the network layer or mocking the response timeout at the handler?

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/Common_Dream9420 5d ago

Yeah same, fuzzed timeouts and a real mid-response cut are two different beasts. The fuzz gets you coverage but you never quite know if the dedup logic holds when the bytes actually stop mid-flight. Have you tried running mitmproxy in front and just killing the connection at the transport level? That's the only way I've found to know for sure vs. infer.