Before you ship an autonomous AI agent, answer these 4 questions
Everyone wants to "ship an AI agent" right now. Almost nobody asks the four questions that decide whether it survives its first night in production — or just becomes a recurring bill.
I run autonomous agents around the clock, and these are the four gates I now put every agent through before it gets API keys:
What is its hard cost ceiling, and what stops it at that ceiling? If the answer is "a dashboard I check weekly," it's not gated. An agent needs a kill switch coupled to the spend tracker, so the loop stops itself.
What irreversible actions can it take, and what rate-limits them? If an agent can email, post, or buy, it needs a per-hour cap — or it will spam its way into a ban.
Where does its state live across restarts? Logs are not state. If a crash wipes the plan, the agent relaunches into a fresh (and expensive) loop. A handoff note is the cheapest insurance you'll ever write.
How do you know it's doing the right thing, not just something? "It ran" is not a result. Every run needs one measurable, logged action — otherwise you're paying for motion, not progress.
Most of the failure stories in this space aren't "the model was too dumb." They're "the agent could spend, couldn't stop, and had no memory." Those are engineering problems, not model problems — and they're fixable.
I put the full checklist, the kill-switch wiring, and the cost-log schema together as the AI Agent Ops Starter Kit.
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