Free Production Checklist

Production AI Agent Pre-Flight Checklist

50 essential sanity checks and fatal pitfalls to audit before running autonomous AI agent loops in production or unattended schedules.

1. Environment, Encoding & Runtime Isolation

Items 01–08

UTF-8 Codec Enforcement

Is sys.stdout.reconfigure(encoding="utf-8", errors="replace") set to prevent Windows GBK crashes on emoji logs?

Non-Interactive Execution Flags

Are all subprocess CLI calls passed non-interactive flags (--confirm, --prod, CI=1) to avoid hanging on TTY input?

Path Traversal & Root Jail

Are file write operations strictly jailed inside workspace roots, rejecting ../ traversals?

Proxy Dual-Protocol Config

Are both http and https keys present in proxy dictionaries for external API requests?

2. Tool Calling & Schema Robustness

Items 09–18

Self-Healing JSON Parsing

Does tool parameter parsing implement regex/heuristic repair for unescaped quotes and missing braces before failing?

Pydantic Validation & Auto-Coercion

Are all tool inputs validated against strict Pydantic schemas with structured error messages fed back to the LLM on mismatch?

Gumroad & Stripe Currency Units

Are prices explicitly converted to cents (int(price_usd * 100)) to prevent selling $29 products for $0.29?

Per-Tool Execution Timeouts

Does every external tool call have a strict hard timeout (max 60–120s) to prevent frozen agent loops?

3. Token Budgets, Memory & Circuit Breakers

Items 19–32

Session & Daily Token Hard Cap

Is there an immutable cost threshold (e.g., $0.50/run or $10/day) that triggers a hard kill-switch upon breach?

Sliding Context Window Summarization

Are messages older than N turns automatically compressed into episodic summaries to avoid context inflation?

Atomic Disk State Checkpointing

Is every state transition written to an append-only JSON/SQLite file so crashed agents resume without re-running LLMs?

Zero-PII Dynamic Scrubbing

Are real developer emails, credentials, and customer identities scrubbed and replaced with cryptographic aliases?

4. Automated Deployment & Verification

Items 33–50

Idempotent Product Publishing

Does publishing use state IDs to update existing products (PUT) rather than blindly creating duplicates?

Covers-After-Deploy Sequence

Are static sites deployed to edge CDNs before attaching covers so Gumroad can fetch live public image URLs?

Headless Browser Smoke Test

Does the agent perform a headless HTTP/DOM verification to ensure the live product URL returns HTTP 200?

Webhook Failure Alerting

Are critical pipeline failures wired to instant Telegram/Discord/Slack webhooks with truncated stack traces?

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