Five questions to ask before letting an AI agent call a state-changing tool in production
ainexfinder · reddit · 2026-10-05
The author replaced hoarding "cool MCP servers" with a boring pre-prod checklist before any agent tool call that changes state:
- Who is the principal? A stable agent/subagent identity, not a shared service account.
- What was delegated for this run? Read/write/destructive decided before the first side effect, not inferred after.
- What does the tool listing disclose? Same columns every time: auth path, side-effect class, last-reviewed/version; unannotated side effects treated as destructive.
- Is the app behind the tool ready? Missing idempotency, no audit trail, or auth that can't attribute actions are deal-breakers.
- What happens when policy/auth is down? Fail closed; fail-open harness hooks are for audit, not control.
For tool shortlisting, a three-row spreadsheet plus one real task per tool beats vibe rankings.
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