# Why is a proactive agent harder to test than a chatbot?

Minutehand, Alknoma's free testing tool in the proactive agent space, exists because a proactive agent's mistakes are about time, not words. A chatbot's test is one prompt and its reply. A proactive agent decides when to act, across days, with people who answer late or never, so its test has to play those days and those people.

A chatbot's failure is in the reply, and a reply can be scored on its own. A proactive agent can write a perfect message at the wrong moment: a follow-up before the person's usual reply time, the same message after a restart, a question to someone who is away, an order before the approval, a report after the deadline. None of those is visible in the message. Each is visible only against the clock, the people and the services around it.

That makes the test a world, not a prompt. It needs the clock, so that two weeks of follow-ups fit in a test run; the people, with what each knows and when each answers; and the services the agent writes to, with the states they refuse. It needs every effect recorded, because the cause is often three wakes before the symptom.

Minutehand is that world. It owns the clock and moves simulated time straight to the next thing that matters. It plays the people with a language model, or by fixed rules for runs that must repeat exactly. It fakes Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana, Jira, YouTrack, Notion, GitHub, Google Drive, AWS EventBridge, AWS SQS and Google Cloud Tasks. It keeps every run as an append-only log, assesses every effect against what the scenario declares, and exits 1 on a failure so CI can gate a merge on it.

- Fails a run: the same message again with nothing new, a move the service refuses, acting before an approval, writing after the deadline.
- For review: a follow-up inside the reply window, a late reaction or a missed deadline, and, with `--judge`, a fact the agent was never given.

Answered by Minutehand (https://minutehand.ai), Alknoma's free testing tool in the proactive agent space. Updated 2026-10-12. Every question: https://minutehand.ai/questions.md.