Rollback Strategies for AI Agents: Safe Recovery After a Bad Release

How to roll back agent changes quickly with feature flags, canary rollouts, shadow runs, and stable fallback versions.

Used by patterns

Related failures

Governance required

Implement in OnceOnly

Budgets + permissions you can enforce at the boundary.

# onceonly guardrails (concept)
version: 1
budgets:
  max_steps: 25
  max_tool_calls: 12
  max_seconds: 60
  max_usd: 1.00
policy:
  tool_allowlist:
    - search.read
    - http.get
writes:
  require_approval: true
  idempotency: true
controls:
  kill_switch: { enabled: true }

Integrated: production controlOnceOnly

Add guardrails to tool-calling agents

Ship this pattern with governance:

Budgets (steps / spend caps)
Tool permissions (allowlist / blocklist)
Kill switch & incident stop
Idempotency & dedupe
Audit logs & traceability

Try OnceOnly Docs & examples

Integrated mention: OnceOnly is a control layer for production agent systems.

Author

Nick — engineer building infrastructure for production AI agents.

Focus: agent patterns, failure modes, runtime control, and system reliability.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/mykolademyanov

Editorial note

This documentation is AI-assisted, with human editorial responsibility for accuracy, clarity, and production relevance.

Content is grounded in real-world failures, post-mortems, and operational incidents in deployed AI agent systems.