Illustrative example, Fictional data, Not a client result
An agent scope sheet and triage drill for a billing service
Two artifacts a CTO can review before any agent touches production: what the triage agent may and may not do, and a drill showing where it hands over to a person. The company, services and incident are invented.
- Before
- Alerts page the CTO directly. The billing runbook lives in one person’s head, and agents use broad tokens from a shared account.
- After
- A scoped triage agent gathers context and drafts a first diagnosis. The on-call engineer decides, and only the escalation path reaches the CTO.
Inspect the sample
01 Input
The CTO of Quillhaven, a fictional SaaS company with 12 engineers, still takes every page for the billing service. The team has started opening agent-written pull requests, and nobody has agreed who approves them.
How it moves
- Scope the agent List the repos, logs and tools it may read, the commands it may run, and what it must never touch.
- Write the runbook Turn the CTO’s knowledge of billing failures into steps an engineer can follow at night.
- Run a drill Replay a past incident in staging and check that the agent stops and pages at the right point.
- Set the review rule Agent pull requests need tests and an approving engineer who understands the change.
02 Output
| Area | Allowed | Never | Stop and page when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code | Read the billing and invoicing repositories | Push to main or merge its own pull requests | A fix touches payment-provider code |
| Logs and metrics | Query the last 24 hours of billing logs and dashboards | Export customer data outside the logging tool | The error rate stays high after the runbook steps |
| Actions | Restart the invoice worker in staging; open a draft pull request | Change production configuration or secrets | Any production change is needed |
| Data | Use masked sample invoices for tests | Read card numbers or bank details | A test would need real customer records |
| People | Page the on-call engineer with a summary | Contact customers or the payment provider | The on-call engineer has not acknowledged within 15 minutes |
03 Review
Where a person decides
The on-call engineer approves every action beyond reading and drafting, and every agent pull request needs an engineer who understands the change. The CTO approves the scope sheet and any change to it.
Limits of this example
Fictional company, services and timings. A real scope sheet depends on your stack and your risks. A billing service touches payment records, which Build Plus lists; we confirm the level when we scope it, and rotation response terms are set in writing.
See whether this fits your work, and what it would take.