Your agent loop is not a production system

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Key takeaways

• Mutation, not model choice, is the production boundary. Once an agent can change state, approval, identity, attribution, and verification have to become first-class system concerns.
• Approval, execution, and completion are three different proofs. A tool can run successfully without the operational problem being solved.
• Standardize the harness contracts centrally, while domain teams retain ownership of tool semantics, task policy, and the definition of done.

Agent frameworks make it easy to connect models to tools. The harder work begins when those tools can change production. Drawing on my work on AWS DevOps Agent, I argue that leaders should standardize five contracts – context, state, tools, control, and completion – before teams scale agent autonomy.

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