Agentic prototypes can look convincing long before they are safe to operate. Production readiness begins when the system has explicit boundaries: what the agent may do, which tools it may call, what data it may access, and which actions require human approval.
Permissions before autonomy
Tool access should be narrow, auditable, and tied to the task. High-impact actions need deterministic controls, not only model instructions.
Evaluation as an engineering loop
Reliable behavior needs repeatable evaluation across normal cases, edge cases, failure modes, and regressions.
Observability and ownership
Production systems need traces, structured events, cost and latency visibility, and clear escalation paths. The practical shift is from making an agent appear intelligent to making its behavior governable, testable, and supportable.