01
Execution environment
Agents need a place to run commands that is isolated, observable, and replaceable.
- Dedicated agent servers or devboxes.
- Reproducible language and package setup.
- Network boundaries.
- Clean reset path after risky tasks.
Reference guide
What your team needs before agents touch real engineering work.
Agentic engineering is an infrastructure problem before it is a prompt problem. This checklist covers the operating layer needed for safe team adoption.
01
Audit
02
Guardrails
03
Deployment Paths
04
Preview Envs
05
Team Handoffs
06
Operating Layer
02
Access control
AI-assisted work needs scoped access that matches the task, not broad production trust.
- Scoped GitHub permissions.
- Secrets separated by environment.
- Database access policy.
- Auditable credential rotation.
03
Human review path
Agent output should flow through the same engineering controls that protect human code.
- Branch and PR workflow.
- Preview deployments.
- Test and lint gates.
- Rollback plan before production changes.
04
Operational feedback
The team needs visibility into what agents changed, shipped, and broke.
- Deployment logs.
- Application logs.
- Resource utilization.
- Incident ownership and escalation path.