Your AI agent does not need observability. It needs a kill switch. Most agent demos fail quietly. The button works. The trace looks fine. The agent finishes the happy path. Then someone points it at real work. It retries the same tool call. It burns tokens on a bad plan. It calls the same API with the same bad input. It keeps going because nothing in the runtime says stop. That is the gap. Tracing tells you what happened. A kill switch changes what happens next. The real production question Before you ship an agent, ask this: Can the team stop it from outside the process? Not by killing a laptop terminal. Not by editing code. Not by waiting for a deploy. Can an operator open a control plane and stop the run? If the answer is no, the agent is still a demo. What a useful control should do A real runtime control does three boring things: It caps spend before the run gets expensive. It detects loops before retries compound. It lets a human stop the agent remotely. That is not fancy. That is the point.…