---

name: production-pipelines description: strategies for building automated CI/CD pipelines for agents. Use this to implement "shift left" testing, staged validation, and evaluation-gated deployments.

Production Pipelines for Agents

Goal

Establish a disciplined pre-production process that trades manual uncertainty for automated confidence, ensuring no agent reaches users without passing rigorous quality and safety gates.

The CI/CD Funnel (Shift Left)

Design your pipeline to catch errors as early and as cheaply as possible by following a structured three-phase workflow:

Phase 1: Pre-Merge Integration (CI)

• Trigger: Automatically runs when a developer opens a Pull Request (PR).
• Checks:
  • Fast unit tests and code linting.
  • Agent Quality Evaluation: Run the evaluation suite against key scenarios to ensure performance hasn't degraded.
• Goal: Act as a gatekeeper for the main branch to prevent performance pollution.

Phase 2: Post-Merge Staging (CD)

• Trigger: Runs after a change is merged into the main branch.
• Environment: A high-fidelity replica of production.
• Tests:
  • Resource-intensive load testing.
  • Integration tests against live remote services.
  • Dogfooding: Internal user testing to gather qualitative feedback.

Phase 3: Gated Production Deployment

• Trigger: Requires manual approval from a Product Owner (Human-in-the-Loop).
• Goal: Promote the exact validated artifact from staging to the live environment.

Core Automation Technologies

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Use tools like Terraform to ensure environments are identical, repeatable, and version-controlled.
• Testing Frameworks: Utilize tools like Pytest to handle agent-specific artifacts, such as conversation histories and reasoning traces.
• Secrets Management: Use dedicated services like Secret Manager to inject API keys at runtime instead of hardcoding them.