Section 01
Executive Summary
A hardening path that turns pilot wins into dependable production systems.
Key takeaways
- Threat model every agent and define its blast radius.
- Bake evaluation gates into CI before major releases.
- Use staged rollouts with clear rollback criteria.
- Treat prompts and policies as versioned assets.
Who this is for
- Engineering leaders scaling pilot agents to production.
- Security teams that need AI-specific controls.
- Product owners responsible for reliability targets.
Section 02
Production Readiness Signals
These signals show whether an agent is ready to move beyond a pilot.
Figure 00 · Agent Reliability Response Flow
Section 03
Hardening Workflow
Sequence security, evaluation, and rollout work so each stage earns the next.
Figure 01 · Squeeze Funnel
Speculation - Teams that run weekly red-team drills cut incident response time by half within the first quarter.
Section 04
Execution Notes
Use these guardrails to keep production launches safe and predictable.
Figure 02 · Community Funnel
Controls to implement before launch
Build in validation and auditing before broad rollouts start.
- Introduce a policy test suite for every major prompt change.
- Run manual reviews on the top 5% most sensitive outputs.
- Set alert thresholds for model drift and latency spikes.
- Publish a runbook for each agent with owners listed.
Related reading
Keep scaling with operations and uptime playbooks.