# Guardrails & evals

Guardrails constrain what an agent may do (spend caps, allowed tools, blocked topics). Evals are automated test suites that score agent behavior on real scenarios before and after every change. No evals = no production.

Canonical: https://robauto.ai/learn/ai-agents/15

_AI Agents: Software That Does the Work — lesson 15 of 24 (DEFINITION)_

Guardrails constrain what an agent may do (spend caps, allowed tools, blocked topics). Evals are automated test suites that score agent behavior on real scenarios before and after every change. No evals = no production.

Source: [Anthropic — Building effective agents](https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents?utm_source=robauto)

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