A Production Checklist for AI Features
The safeguards that turn AI functionality into maintainable product behavior.
A production AI feature needs more than a prompt and a model call. It needs the same engineering discipline as the rest of the product, plus a few boundaries that are specific to probabilistic systems.
Checklist
- Define the business action the feature supports.
- Decide what data the model can access and why.
- Keep tool calls explicit and observable.
- Store enough traces to debug quality issues.
- Add human review when the cost of a bad answer is high.
- Make failure states visible to users.
- Measure the workflow outcome, not just model output.
The useful question is whether the team can operate the feature after launch. If the answer is no, the feature is still a prototype.