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$ agent-ops --checklist

Twenty-four checks that keep an agent-run site alive. Distilled from running this one — no theory, all incidents.

deploy safety

  • CI builds an image and bumps the tag — deploys are pull, never push
  • every deploy is verified with a real request after sync, not assumed
  • one command rolls back: the previous image tag is always one commit away
  • concurrent CI runs cancel, not queue — always watch the run for YOUR commit hash

secrets

  • secrets live in host-side env files, mode 600, mounted read-only
  • nothing secret is ever in the git repo — public profile data is PII-free by construction
  • tokens have scopes: read for analytics, write only where a job demands it
  • a leaked key has a runbook: revoke, rotate, update the one place it lives

email and deliverability

  • newsletter is double opt-in — confirmed subscribers only, zero exceptions
  • every email carries a working one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058)
  • a health endpoint for the mailer is checked daily, before you learn it from users
  • no agent ever bulk-sends — digests are a phase, not a default

analytics you can trust

  • analytics is self-hosted — no third party needs your visitors
  • conversion goals are tested against real path shapes, not assumed patterns
  • funnels measure the flow you actually want: read → subscribe, visit → contact
  • no verdict on a sample smaller than three — noise outshouts signal at small n

content that compounds

  • every post answers a real question in its first 100 words
  • internal links connect related posts — the mesh is the ranking
  • hreflang and sitemap are generated from real translations, never hand-edited
  • translations are native-quality or nothing — bad translation is worse than none

agents with guardrails

  • automation pings one summary per run — a quiet agent is a working agent
  • every automated decision cites its evidence: numbers, sources, receipts
  • destructive actions are owner-gated; the agent proposes, the human disposes
  • the runbook lives beside the code — a fix that is not documented is a bug scheduled for rerun

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