Grab the Ops Starter Kit before you need it (instant download)
Your AI agent has root access and no incident plan. Fix both in 30 minutes.
AI agents went from demos to production faster than any infrastructure shift I've seen. And almost none of them ship with the two things every other production system gets by default: least privilege and an incident plan.
The uncomfortable pattern: teams give an agent an API key, walk away, and only discover the blast radius when something breaks — or when the bill does.
Here is the 30-minute audit I run on any AI-agent deployment. Eight checks, in order of how badly they hurt when skipped.
1. Inventory the agents
You cannot protect what you didn't list. Every agent gets a line in a text file: what it is, what keys it holds, what it can spend, who notices when it misbehaves. If this takes more than ten minutes, that is the finding.
2. Least privilege, actually
Agents should never inherit a human's credentials. Dedicated API keys, scoped to the minimum. If an agent only reads from the database, it gets a read-only key — not "the same key we all use because it's easier."
Test: can the agent do anything destructive? If yes, scope it down right now.
3. Append-only audit trail
Every agent action gets logged to a store the agent itself cannot edit. Plain text log shipped off the box is fine. The point is: after an incident, you can answer "what did it actually do?" without guessing.
4. Spend ceilings
A runaway loop is the most common agent failure mode, and it bills per token. Hard caps at the provider level, plus an alert at 80% of budget. This is the cheapest insurance in the whole list.
5. A real kill switch
One command (or one button) that revokes every agent credential at once. Practiced, not theoretical. If revoking means "rotate keys in seven systems," you don't have a kill switch — you have a scavenger hunt.
6. Contain the blast radius
Agents run in containers/sandboxes with explicit filesystem and network scopes. Never the deploy box, never the CI runner that pushes to prod, never your laptop with the staging SSH key on it.
7. Output guardrails
Agent output is untrusted input to the next system. Strip secrets before logging, don't pipe agent output straight into shell commands, and treat anything it "learned" from the web as data, not instructions.
8. The 2am plan
When (not if) an agent does something dumb at 2am: who gets paged, what do they run to stop it, how do you verify the fix? Fifteen minutes to write. Every hour of panic later it saves.
Ops Starter Kit — runbooks, comms templates, the 2am plan (instant download) → https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit
Agent Ops 24/7 — for teams putting agents on call → https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/agent-ops-24-7
If one of the eight checks above just made you wince — that's the one to fix first.
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