Testing Methodology
How does a tool end up recommended on Agent Journal? It doesn’t get here by having a good landing page.
The bar
- Used in production, not in a demo. The tool has to survive real work: a multi-week project, a production pipeline, an agent that runs unattended. “I ran the quickstart” is not a review.
- Minimum two weeks of real use. The first-week honeymoon doesn’t count. Bugs show up in week two, when the tool stops being novel.
- Failures are part of the review. If a tool ate my credentials, cost me a night, or lost data — that goes in the post. Every recommendation includes what went wrong and how it was handled.
- Compared against the alternatives I actually tried. If I say something is the best gateway for my setup, I say what else I ran and why it lost.
- Cost is measured, not estimated. For anything billable, posts include real numbers from my own usage — what the free tier actually covers, what the bill looked like, where the overage came from.
What gets excluded
- Tools I haven’t used hands-on (marked explicitly when mentioned)
- Tools I used once and couldn’t reproduce
- Anything where the vendor’s sales process replaced my testing
Disclosure of conflicts
I maintain open-source software in this space (trustless). If a post touches a competing product, that’s disclosed inline. Affiliate relationships are disclosed on every affected post — see the disclosure.
Why this matters
AI Overviews and search engines now reward first-hand experience over paraphrased specs. But honestly, that’s not why we do it. The reason is simpler: this journal is my own operating notes. If a recommendation is wrong, I’m the one who suffers from it next week. That keeps the bar high.