Engineering
Designing AI Agents You Can Trust With Real Work
Learn how tool contracts, approval gates, permissions, observability and traceability make AI agents safer and more reliable for real business workflows.
TenzorDev Engineering · · 6 min read
Autonomy is not a switch. It is a level you earn per action, measured against a human baseline you have already recorded.
Define the tools narrowly
Each tool an agent can call should do one thing, validate its own input and be idempotent. Broad, flexible tools produce broad, unpredictable behaviour.
Gate the consequential steps
Reading, drafting and classifying can run freely. Sending, paying, deleting and committing should pass through an approval queue until the metrics justify removing it.
Trace everything
Every run should record its inputs, tool calls, outputs and cost, and be replayable. When something goes wrong, the question is always: what did it see, and what did it decide?