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Engineering discipline

Severity-gated deployment for agents — the 24-hour rule

Why a green evaluation suite within the last 24 hours is the right pre-promotion gate, and how to operationalise it without slowing engineering velocity.

22 June 2026Miracle Alex

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Why 24 hours

Shorter windows penalise small teams who legitimately cannot re-run a full harness on every push. Longer windows let yesterday's evaluation certify today's regressed code. 24 hours is the operationally honest middle.

Severity, not pass/fail

A blocker failure stops promotion. A regression failure raises an incident but does not block. A warning is trended. Engineering velocity survives; the safety floor does not move.

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