Definition
AgOps (agentic operations) is the set of practices and tooling that make agentic workflows reliable: permissions, budgets, gating, observability, and incident handling.
If DevOps is “run software,” AgOps is “run software that writes software.”
What AgOps owns
- Execution policy: what agents are allowed to do (and where)
- Gating policy: what must pass before merge/deploy (gated multi-agent flow)
- Evidence: standard receipts, logs, artifacts (build receipt)
- Isolation: sandboxing, forks, environment separation (shadow fork)
- Cost control: quotas, rate limits, batching (wave of agents)
- Failure handling: retries, backoffs, escalation paths
Why it matters
Without AgOps, “agentic” turns into:
- invisible work,
- unclear provenance,
- and fragile automation that no one trusts.
With AgOps, you get predictable throughput: the system behaves more like CI than like a chat.
Practical rule
- Define the trust boundary.
- Standardize receipts and make them mandatory.
- Establish sandbox defaults (no secrets unless explicitly required).
- Build a small set of reusable workflows (setup, test lanes, release).
- Track reliability metrics: pass rates, retries, time-to-green.
Common failure mode
Optimizing for activity (“agents ran”) instead of outcomes (“gates passed”). That’s reward hacking at the system level.