Hardware is hardware. At some point you have to run and test it on the real thing, and it always misbehaves in some previously undiscovered way.

A lot of software people live under the illusion that hardware bugs don't happen, but they're ubiquitous and it's the job of firmware and OS people to reduce their impact.

Edit: I should add anyone that's worked with me knows I strongly advocate offline fuzz testing of all software components, especially to deal with unexpected states coming from the hardware side. This has proven unreasonably effective, and absolutely is something agents can help with, but they won't solve the whole problem.