Agent Governance Guardrails

An agent without guardrails isn't an autonomous worker — it's a liability waiting for a deadline. This playbook defines the conditions every production agent must satisfy before it's allowed to act, and the review loop that keeps it honest over time.

Every agent must meet three conditions before it runs unattended:

• Reversible — its actions can be undone or rolled back within a defined window.
• Auditable — every decision is logged with inputs, outputs, and the rule that authorized it.
• Bounded — it can only act within an explicit, documented scope.

Guardrails aren't set-and-forget. Schedule a periodic review of the audit log — weekly for high-stakes agents, monthly for the rest — and look for two things: decisions that were blocked incorrectly (too tight), and decisions that slipped through (too loose).

Before you give an agent real authority, write down its three conditions explicitly and stand up the review loop. The teams that avoid incidents aren't the ones with the smartest models — they're the ones who made the boundaries explicit before the agent ever ran.