AGENTS ON CALLNovember 2026
02:47 All dashboards green · something is wrong

AgentsonCall

Software just got hands.

The Site Reliability Playbook for AI in Production

A book by Vijaybhasker Pagidoju

First edition · November 2026 · Ebook & Paperback
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    01 · THE PROBLEM

    Every tool you trust was built to notice absence. The new failures are aggressively present.

    AI agents now hold credentials, take real actions, and make judgment calls in production — and nothing in the classic operations toolkit can see a system that is confidently wrong. Latency is fine. Error rate is fine. The service returned 200. The content was the failure.

    The dashboards stay green. The money moves anyway.

    AGENTS ON CALL is the day-two book: not how to build the thing — shelves of good books do that — but how to run it, written by a practitioner who built this discipline in production. By the last page you can put an AI system on call, with objectives it can be held to, incidents it can be walked through, permissions it cannot exceed, and costs it cannot silently explode.

    02 · THE VOCABULARY

    The book names the discipline — and hands you its words.

    semantic failure
    confidently wrong output with no error code — the signature failure of systems built on models
    the drawer
    your unaudited machine-credential inventory, now a hundred badges per human
    the action gate
    independent validation no eloquence can talk past — the actor never grades its own homework
    the trust ladder
    recommend → approve → act; the promotion path for any automation
    zero-model-call path
    a revenue-critical flow engineered to complete with no model at all
    03 · THE READER

    Written for the people day two lands on.

    I.The engineer with the pager

    Your company shipped an assistant, and the first strange transcript is climbing through support. Your runbook doesn't cover software that can be wrong without being down.

    II.The director setting policy

    The board asked what the company's newest software is allowed to touch — and who answers for it. Chapter 16 is a ninety-day plan you can hand a leadership team.

    III.The security engineer

    Machine identities outnumber your humans a hundred to one, and some of them now make decisions. This book makes the drawer boring again.

    04 · CONTENTS

    Sixteen chapters. Four parts. One map.

    PART I

    The Collision

    The new failure class · what survives from SRE · the five-plane map you can score your company on by Friday.

    PART II

    Running AI Reliably

    Answer-quality SLOs and evals · observability for minds · incidents on transcripts · agents as identities · the language attack surface · orchestration · token FinOps · zero-model-call resilience · change management for nondeterminism.

    PART III

    Letting AI Run Production

    The AI-SRE tool wave · guardrails for automated remediation · the on-call org when agents share the pager.

    PART IV

    The Road

    The ninety-day plan · three honest case studies · the last line the whole book earns.

    05 · THE ESSAYS

    Start free. Each essay is a chapter's core idea, standing alone.

    The Badge Drawerthis week
    Answer-Quality SLOspublishing soon
    Zero-Model-Call Resiliencepublishing soon
    The AI SRE Trust Ladderpublishing soon
    06 · THE AUTHOR

    Vijaybhasker Pagidoju

    VP

    A senior technology leader who has spent his career running production infrastructure at scale. He wrote this book because nothing on the shelf covered the systems he was being asked to run. He lives in Missouri. This is his first book.

    07 · AT LAUNCH

    Launch readers get the ninety-day plan, free.

    Sign up and Chapter 16's ninety-day plan arrives the week the book ships — the page you can hand a leadership team. Chapters and essays as they land, launch news, nothing else.

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