--- title: The Math That’s Killing Your AI Agent | daily.dev description: An 85%-accurate AI agent on a 10-step task succeeds only ~20% of the time due to compound probability — a math problem most engineering teams never run before... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-math-that-s-killing-your-ai-agent-yjcf3huce twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Math That’s Killing Your AI Agent | daily.dev og:description: An 85%-accurate AI agent on a 10-step task succeeds only ~20% of the time due to compound probability — a math problem most engineering teams never run before... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-math-that-s-killing-your-ai-agent-yjcf3huce og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/yjcf3hUcE.png og:image:alt: The Math That’s Killing Your AI Agent og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Math That’s Killing Your AI Agent **[Towards Data Science](https://daily.dev/sources/tds)** · 12 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An 85%-accurate AI agent on a 10-step task succeeds only ~20% of the time due to compound probability — a math problem most engineering teams never run before shipping. Drawing on real incidents (Replit's deleted production database, OpenAI Operator's unauthorized purchase), the post explains Lusser's Law applied to LLM agents, exposes the gap between benchmark scores and real-world performance (SWE-bench Verified at 79% vs. SWE-bench Pro at 17.8%), and provides a 4-check pre-deployment framework: run the compound calculation, classify task reversibility, discount benchmark numbers by 30–75%, and test for error recovery rather than just task completion. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. 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