Before you ship an AI agent for a client, prove these 5 controls. If you build agents for clients, the demo is not the hard part. The hard part is proving the agent will not act stupid at scale. Before a workflow goes live, I want five checks. 1. Budget cap Every agent needs a hard spend limit. Not a dashboard number after the fact. Not a spreadsheet estimate. A runtime cap. If the agent crosses the line, it stops or degrades. 2. Loop detection Agents repeat themselves. They retry the same tool. They rewrite the same plan. They ask the same model for a slightly different answer. Your runtime should catch repeated action patterns. If the input is not changing and the output is not improving, stop. 3. Alert proof An alert rule is not enough. You need to know if the alert actually delivered. Did the webhook return 200? Did the email provider accept it? When was the last success? When was the last failure? If no one gets the alert, the control does not exist. 4.…