Complete the Agent Design Package
Explore the process of assembling a complete agent design package by integrating decisions on orchestration, state persistence, reliability, containment, and failure analysis. Learn to create enforceable controls, trace architectural decisions to evidence, and prepare the package for enterprise review ensuring operational safety and governance. This lesson helps you validate AI agent architectures with clear enforcement points, risk management, and a plan for integration.
We'll cover the following...
- Agent design package structure and reviewability
- Reconciling decisions into one coherent system
- The containment envelope as an enforceable contract
- Failure-mode analysis that a review can act on
- Handoff contract to integration and identity work
- Design-review reflection and phase gate
- Practice: Defend one reconciliation against the phase gate
- Chapter summary
Each component of the chapter’s deliverable is developed in a separate lesson: the agent-versus-workflow decision, orchestration architecture decision record (ADR), state and replay specification, reliability policy, containment envelope, and failure-mode analysis. To support a complete architecture review, reconcile these components in a single agent design package.
A review group representing platform, security, and product must be able to approve the package, approve it conditionally subject to defined experiments, or reject it based on documented evidence and residual risk. Conditional approval should identify the required experiments, owners, success criteria, and review deadline.
The package is acceptable only when it is both inspectable and enforceable. Each architectural decision must be traceable to supporting evidence, and each required control must be mapped to an owner, enforcement point, and verification method. The package must document the orchestration decisions, state-persistence and replay-support behavior, and reliability controls appropriate to the side effects of each tool. It must also define the containment envelope and its enforcement points, together with a failure-mode analysis that maps each failure mode to detection signals, mitigations, and accountable owners.
Before implementation begins, the package must document its assumptions, rejected alternatives, and evidence plan for unresolved ...