Most agentic systems let the model decide where a message goes. That's exactly where control collapses. I built nine deterministic routing rules instead — and shipped 430 tests to prove they work.
Every autonomous system needs a kill switch. Almost no one actually runs the drill. I did — and found two production bugs hiding inside tests that passed.
We ran a four-level emergency shutdown drill on our agent fleet. Two levels passed clean. Two exposed gaps that would have burned us in production.
Every system I built was designed to run autonomously. None of them were designed to stop. That's a problem when you're the only human in the org chart.