Agent Runbook

Operational writing about running AI agents in production — what they cost, what they are allowed to touch, and how you find out what they did.

Three articles so far. Every one of them states its method in the first paragraph: what was measured, what was modelled, and what was not tested. If a number came from a vendor's pricing page rather than our own instrumentation, it says so at the top rather than in the small print.

Articles

• What an AI Agent Run Actually Costs

  A twelve-turn agent run costs $2.56, not the $0.31 a single-request estimate predicts. The model, the arithmetic, and the one metric that makes model choice testable.

• Scoping an MCP Server's Permissions Before You Connect It

  Six steps and a ten-minute checklist for deciding what an MCP server is allowed to touch — before you connect it, not after an incident.

• Agent Observability Compared: Langfuse, Helicone and Braintrust

  Langfuse, Helicone and Braintrust on published pricing and documented capability, with the cost arithmetic at 500k traces — and the places the sources contradict each other left visible.

What this is

A small publication, written by the team at Agency Agents, about the unglamorous half of agent engineering. Not model releases, not benchmarks, not predictions. Cost arithmetic you can redo with your own numbers, permission checklists you can run before connecting a server, and tool comparisons that admit where the published figures disagree with each other.

The articles are deliberately few. In a niche where anyone can generate a hundred posts a week, volume is not a signal — so we would rather publish three articles with their assumptions exposed than thirty that restate documentation.

Who writes this

Agency Agents builds and operates agent fleets, and has built a small number of skill packs that encode the same practices these articles describe. That page describes them, and is explicit that they are not currently available to buy.

This site is a working build. It is not indexed by search engines, and nothing here is an announcement.