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This guide focuses on AI agent incident response for production systems, with practical trade-offs for reliability, security, and cost.
Agents will go wrong: bad tool call, poisoned retrieval, runaway loop. Incident response needs kill switches, replay, and customer-safe communication — practiced before SEV-1.
⚡ TL;DR: Global and per-feature kill switches. Freeze mutating tools first. Replay traces to find blast radius. Communicate without speculative AI blame language.
AI agent incident response: production guidance
- Flip AI mode to
read_onlyoroffline(Day 78). - Disable specific tool groups if known.
- Snapshot gateway traces for the window.
- Identify tenants/users touched.
- Customer comms template — facts only.
python
# ✅ Kill switch read path in gateway
def guard(feature: str, flags: dict):
if flags.get("ai_global_off"):
raise Unavailable("AI temporarily disabled")
if not flags.get(f"feature:{feature}", True):
raise Unavailable(f"{feature} disabled")
Replay
Use Day 66 audit trails: same inputs → see tool calls. Prefer twin for re-runs. ❌ Re-running the failing mutate against prod to “see if it happens again.”Failure modes
Kill switch that only stops new sessions while in-flight Step Functions keep mutating. Cancel running executions and revoke tool IAM with SCPs if needed. Comms that speculate about “AI bias” before facts — stick to impact and actions.Closing checklist
- [ ] Kill switches tested quarterly
- [ ] On-call knows flag names
- [ ] Trace export path documented
- [ ] Comms templates ready
- [ ] Postmortem includes prompt/tool versions
Series navigation
Day 94: Change Management for Prompts · Day 96: Hiring and Team Topology for AI Platform Last updated September 11, 2026 Related: Day 51: Multi-Agent Roles: Planner, Implementer, Critic; Day 53: Avoiding Agent Ping-Pong; Day 54: Specialist Tools per Agent.Watch: 100 Days of AI on YouTube
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