Five questions before deployment

Blast radius, accountability, 100× volume.

Five questions before every deployment

If the answer to any of these is no, the agent is not ready.

1. What is the blast radius if this agent gets it wrong?

Financial impact × data sensitivity × reversibility. If any factor is high, start at lower autonomy. An agent that can only generate suggestions has a tiny blast radius regardless of its capability. An agent that can send customer-facing emails at 100× volume has a large one.

2. Who is the single human accountable for this agent?

Not a committee. One person. With authority to modify, pause, or terminate. Their name goes in the REMIT-R cell before launch. If you can't name them, you can't launch.

3. Can you verify the outcome without understanding the process?

If you can't verify it worked, you can't safely delegate it. This is sometimes called contract-first decomposition: define the verifiable output first, decompose the agent's work to produce that output, and evaluate against the contract — not against your mental model of "how it should think".

4. What does this agent look like at 100× volume?

Approval fatigue, cost scaling, cascading failures, and governance overhead all change at scale. An agent that passes human review at 10 runs/day may collapse at 1000. Ask yourself:

• Does approval become a rubber stamp?
• Does the cost curve break the business case?
• Does one upstream failure cascade across hundreds of concurrent sessions?
• Does the reviewer sample rate fall below a governance threshold?

5. Would you delegate this to a new hire with no context?

If the answer is no, you're not ready to delegate it to an agent either. An agent without meaningful oversight is a new hire you sent into the role without training. The failure modes are similar; the speed is a lot faster.

When to use these questions

• In the design review. Before the Agent Canvas is approved.
• In the pre-launch checkpoint. Before any first real-traffic deploy.
• At the quarterly governance review. Has anything changed? Blast radius, owner, scale, trust evidence?

Running this quick diagnostic does not replace REMIT. It makes sure you're not about to sign off on something REMIT would catch.