Agentic operations 1 min read
The Ops Hallway Test for AI Automation
Five checks to run before you let an agent touch production systems or customers.
The five checks
- Idempotency: Can it run twice without breaking things?
- Blast radius: What is the worst it can do in 1 minute? 10 minutes?
- Auditability: Do you log inputs, decisions, outputs with correlation IDs?
- Kill switch: Can you stop it instantly? How?
- Human override: Is there a manual path if automation fails?
Minimal safe defaults
- Per-tenant rate limits; per-action budgets.
- Shadow mode for 48 hours before active mode.
- Write-only to staging; read-only to prod until approved.
Why it matters
AI ops fails quietly, then loudly. Hallway-test every agent before it touches customers.