Production AI Agent Deployment Checklist#

An agent demo can be impressive with almost nothing around it.

A production agent cannot.

Before an agent touches customers, production systems, billing, deploys, or private data, it needs a real checklist.

1. Workflow ownership#

Define:

• Workflow owner.
• Engineering owner.
• Security reviewer.
• Human approver group.
• Escalation path.
• Rollback owner.

If nobody owns the workflow, everyone owns the incident.

2. Tool inventory#

For every tool:

• Name.
• Purpose.
• Risk tier.
• Read or write.
• Auth scope.
• Rate limit.
• Timeout.
• Retry behavior.
• Audit fields.

Tools are production dependencies. Treat them that way.

3. Permissions#

Verify:

• Least privilege.
• Scoped user delegation.
• No raw secrets in prompts.
• Short-lived grants where possible.
• Separate read and write permissions.
• Approval-bound execution for risky actions.

The model should not be your permission system.

4. Approval gates#

Mark each action:

• Auto allowed.
• Draft only.
• Human review.
• Explicit approval.
• Not allowed.

Make the agent stop when the workflow says stop.

5. Evals#

Run replay cases for:

• Happy path.
• Missing context.
• Tool failure.
• Wrong permissions.
• Prompt injection.
• High-risk action.
• Conflicting sources.
• Cost spike.

No evals, no production.

6. Observability#

You need:

• Trace per run.
• Tool call logs.
• Model route.
• Cost by step.
• Latency by step.
• Approval events.
• Human correction rate.
• Error rate.

Do not launch what you cannot inspect.

7. Rollback#

Know how to:

• Disable a workflow.
• Disable a tool.
• Revoke a credential.
• Roll back a prompt or Skill.
• Revert a model route.
• Pause external actions.
• Notify owners.

Rollback is part of the design.

Build it in Codelit#

Try this:

Create a production AI agent deployment checklist for a SaaS workflow. Include ownership, tool inventory, permissions, approvals, evals, observability, cost limits, rollback, security review, and repo handoff.

Generate the deployment checklist

The checklist is not red tape. It is how the agent earns trust.