← All resources
Free Framework
AI Automation Reliability Checklist
Use this before an AI-assisted workflow goes live. The goal is not to make every system complicated; it is to make the failure behavior explicit before users discover it for you.
Last updated 2026-08-14
1. Trigger and delivery guarantees
- ✓Document exactly what starts the workflow.
- ✓Know whether an event can be delayed, duplicated, or missed.
- ✓Define how missed events are reconciled.
2. Idempotency and duplicate protection
- ✓Identify every side effect that must happen only once.
- ✓Use stable event or business identifiers where possible.
- ✓Test duplicate webhook and retry scenarios.
3. Authentication lifecycle
- ✓Document token refresh and credential ownership.
- ✓Keep secrets outside workflow content and source control.
- ✓Define what happens when permissions change or access is revoked.
4. Retry and backoff
- ✓Separate transient failures from permanent validation errors.
- ✓Use bounded retries and backoff.
- ✓Define the final escalation path after retries are exhausted.
5. Rate limits and capacity
- ✓Know provider and SaaS rate limits.
- ✓Set concurrency and batch sizes intentionally.
- ✓Plan for spikes rather than average traffic only.
6. AI output validation
- ✓Parse and validate structured output before downstream actions.
- ✓Treat model output as untrusted input.
- ✓Define fallback behavior for malformed or low-confidence responses.
7. Human-review boundaries
- ✓Identify irreversible, financial, customer-facing, regulated, or privacy-sensitive actions.
- ✓Make approval states explicit.
- ✓Preserve enough context for a reviewer to make the decision quickly.
8. Observability
- ✓Record what ran and why.
- ✓Capture provider/model identifiers and useful request metadata without leaking secrets.
- ✓Make failed and pending items easy to find.
9. Recovery and reconciliation
- ✓Provide a safe way to replay or repair failed items.
- ✓Create an exception queue or operational view where volume justifies it.
- ✓Reconcile important records across systems.
10. Documentation and ownership
- ✓Document architecture, dependencies, credentials, failure modes, and recovery.
- ✓Assign an owner for the workflow after launch.
- ✓Keep written specs and async walkthroughs with the system, not only in chat history.
Need this applied to a real system?
I design and review AI automation, integrations, and operational systems with the same production-first approach.