# AI Agent Production Readiness Checklist
Version 1.0 — 12 October 2026

This is a planning aid, not a certification or guarantee.

## Scope and permissions
- [ ] Define the workflow, owner and measurable success criteria.
- [ ] Restrict tools to the minimum required permissions.
- [ ] Separate untrusted documents from system instructions.
- [ ] Require approval for consequential writes.
- [ ] Set spending, time and tool-call limits.

## Failures and recovery
- [ ] Set timeouts and bounded retries with backoff.
- [ ] Make repeatable writes idempotent.
- [ ] Test interrupted workflows, rate limits and partial failures.
- [ ] Provide a human fallback and a kill switch.

## Evaluation
- [ ] Create representative tasks and explicit pass criteria.
- [ ] Include adversarial inputs and missing-data cases.
- [ ] Compare against the manual baseline.
- [ ] Re-run the evaluation when prompts, models or tools change.

## Operations
- [ ] Keep secrets server-side and rotate them appropriately.
- [ ] Redact sensitive data from logs.
- [ ] Monitor cost, latency, success and intervention rates.
- [ ] Document incident response, rollback and ownership.
- [ ] Validate retention and deletion requirements with the data owner.