Why the Gateway Approach to Agents Sucks (and What to Do Instead) with Marek Poliks

Agentic AI systems require a shift from passive observability to active runtime control to manage non-deterministic behavior effectively. Traditional AI gateways often introduce brittle, high-latency third-party dependencies that fail to provide granular governance over agent harnesses. Instead, leveraging feature flags allows developers to decouple deployment from release, enabling real-time experimentation and automated rollbacks based on live performance metrics. This approach treats agents as evolving components within a continuous feedback loop, prioritizing outcome-driven engineering over static logs. By moving governance inside the application runtime, organizations can maintain security and compliance without sacrificing the agility needed for autonomous architectures. This transition mirrors the evolution of software factories, where the purpose of a system is defined by its real-time outputs rather than its initial inputs, ultimately moving beyond the limitations of traditional, lagging observability tools.