The ai agent explainability problem showed up when our client tried to hire a dev

i run a team of 6, agents in the loop for about a year. claude code mostly, some cursor, composer 2.5 as the worker under fable for the bigger refactors. after a lot of mess it comes down to three things, the rest is noise

1. agents never touch prod directly. this came from a real mistake. back in february a junior gave an agent too much rope and it "fixed" a migration that dropped a column on staging, which was pointed at a prod replica for a demo that week. nothing got deleted for real but it scared us straight. now agents open PRs, thats it

2. everything gets an independent review pass before merge. coderabbit / bugbot for the automated read, then a human on anything touching auth, billing or data. the human part isnt optional on the paths that matter

3. whoever ran the agent owns the output. not the agent, not "the ai did it". you shipped it, its yours

thats the whole thing. everything else we tried was either a version of these or not worth keeping