SRE, platform, and release engineering
Graduated autonomy, not a binary.
The choice is usually framed as agents in production or not. The useful version is narrower: which actions proceed automatically, which wait for a named human, and which never happen at all — expressed as policy rather than as a rule someone remembers.
Ask yourself
Today, what is the difference between an agent deploying to production and an engineer doing it?
Today
What you are working around
- Agents are read-only in production because write access is all-or-nothing
- The workaround is a human copying commands out of a chat window
- Approval happens in Slack and leaves no link to the action it authorized
- Nobody can say afterwards which change an agent made versus a person
What changes
The specific difference
Three outcomes, not two
A policy resolves to permit, forbid, or a requirement for named human approval — which is what makes graduated autonomy expressible at all.
Policy EngineThe call waits rather than fails
A held call suspends with its context intact and resumes on approval, so the agent finishes the job instead of starting over.
Human ApprovalThe approver sees the actual action
Resolved arguments, the manifest diff, the environment, the agent, and the policy that raised the hold — not a summary.
Human ApprovalReversal where reversal exists
Declarative changes can be reverted to the prior recorded state. Where an action is not reversible, the product says so rather than implying an undo.
Runtime Observability
In detail
Be precise about rollback
Rollback is honest for declarative state — a Kubernetes manifest, a feature flag, a config object — where the prior state was recorded and can be reapplied. It is partial for transactional writes, where compensation is possible but not guaranteed to restore the original state. It is impossible for a sent email, a charged card, or a deleted object with no versioning. Cirvix classifies every governed action into one of those three and shows the classification before the action runs, which is more useful than an undo button that sometimes lies.
Timeouts and escalation are load-bearing
An approval nobody answers must fail closed. Requests expire, escalate to a secondary group, and record the expiry — so a forgotten request degrades into a denial rather than a hung run or, worse, an eventual rubber stamp.
Get started
Let the agents do real work.
Start with the free local scanner — it needs no account and tells you what is already ungoverned on your machine. Move to a governed runtime when you are ready.
Cirvix AgentControl is in private beta. Pricing is published and plans are not yet chargeable — early access confirms your place and we will tell you before anything bills.