Agents Need a Production Gate, Not Just a Demo Review
I have seen this pattern more than once. A team builds an agent that summarizes tickets, queries CRM data, and opens service requests. The demo lands well. Leadership wants it in production next month. The agent works, but production is not a quality bar; it is an operational contract. The moment an agent can call a tool, it stops being an ML artifact and becomes production software.
Most of what we know about shipping production software still applies: identity, authorization, logs, rate limits, and rollback. None of this is new. But four assumptions of traditional ops quietly break when the caller is an agent. Execution is no longer deterministic. An HTTP 200 no longer means the action was correct. The threat surface is not static; it grows with every prompt. And on-call engineers cannot resolve every incident on their own, because the relevant judgment is often a business one.