What does it mean that agent effectiveness metrics?

Effectiveness means your agent produces the intended outcome, not just that it runs.

Example: You have a morning planning agent — a routine that fires every day at 7 AM where you review your priorities and set your top three tasks. It fires reliably. It runs every morning without fail. But after two months of tracking, you notice something: the tasks you select during morning planning are the tasks you actually complete only 35% of the time. By end of day, you've drifted to reactive work. The agent is reliable — it fires when it should. But it is not effective — it doesn't produce the outcome it exists for, which is aligned daily action. Reliability and effectiveness are different measurements asking different questions.

Try this: Pick one cognitive agent you already run — a decision-making heuristic, a weekly review, a conflict-resolution protocol, anything that fires in response to a trigger and is supposed to produce a specific result. Define its intended outcome in one sentence. Then review the last five times it fired and score each instance: did the intended outcome actually occur? Calculate your effectiveness rate as a simple percentage. Most people discover their agents are far less effective than they assumed, because they were tracking activation (did it fire?) rather than outcome (did it work?).