uygnoey Managed Agents production harness checklist
This skill distills production-oriented requirements described in the Claude blog post “The evolution of agentic surfaces: building with Claude Managed Agents”.
Instructions
Use this checklist when designing or reviewing a production agent system.
Define the agent surface
- Clarify the task, tools, and guardrails.
- Decide whether you need a managed harness or will maintain your own.
Separate harness and sandbox
- Treat the harness (model calls, orchestration) and the execution sandbox (tool/code runtime) as separate components.
- Prefer an architecture where credentials do not live in the sandbox.
Make sessions first-class
- Persist an append-only log of: every model call, tool call, and result.
- Ensure a run can be reconstructed from the session log for debugging.
Credentials and secret handling
- Keep tool tokens out of the sandbox.
- Retrieve/decrypt secrets only on demand via a dedicated component.
- Track which end user the agent acted on behalf of without passing tokens on every call.
- See: references/vaults-and-credentials.md
Reduce latency and wasted work
- Avoid spinning up an execution environment for sessions that never use tools.
- Allow model reasoning to start in parallel with environment startup.
Observability
- Provide a timeline view and transcript-level debugging of each session.
- Export/emit telemetry (e.g., via OpenTelemetry) if you run the harness yourself.
Persistence, pause/resume, and checkpointing
- Preserve session history between interactions unless explicitly deleted.
- Support pausing and resuming sessions cleanly.
- Checkpoint idle sandboxes so work resumes reliably.
Network and deployment options
- Decide whether sandboxes run in a managed cloud environment or inside your own infrastructure (e.g., VPC).
- If sandboxes are self-hosted, ensure filesystem and network egress stay within your boundary.
- If connecting to internal tools, consider controlled tunnels.
Long-term improvement hooks
- If you maintain memory stores, schedule a review process that looks across sessions to curate durable memories.
Examples
Example: Production readiness review
Use the following prompts in a design review:
- “Where do credentials live, and can the sandbox access them directly?”
- “Do we persist a complete append-only session log (model calls, tool calls, results)?”
- “Can we reconstruct any run from the session log for debugging?”
- “What happens when the agent is idle — do we checkpoint state?”
- “Which sessions never use tools, and are we paying container startup cost anyway?”
Example: Mapping responsibilities
- Harness responsibilities: model calls, tool selection, orchestration, session logging.
- Sandbox responsibilities: executing tool/code steps with restricted access and controlled networking.
Bundled resources
- Reference note on credential separation: references/vaults-and-credentials.md
- Reference note on sessions and event logs: references/sessions-and-events.md
- Checklist template you can copy into a PRD: templates/production-harness-checklist.md