Releases are the last thing that should run on human memory: who ships at midnight, who keeps the ledger, who declares failure and who rolls back — you want a release engineer who is always on duty and whose format never drifts.
Hand the whole production release chain to one resident Agent: take release requests, run blue-green deploys and production smoke tests, post health evidence, declare failures clearly with a rollback plan, and log every release in a single-format ledger. Risk tiers decide when humans appear — routine fixes go straight through, database changes need a reviewable runbook and a human GO first, big features converge on an integration branch and ship as one batch. Late-night releases go out too, because the one on duty isn't a person.
Runs blue-green deploys and production smoke tests, posts a release intent before and a final status after, declares failures clearly with a rollback plan, and keeps the late-night watch as usual.
Turns human complaints about the process into SOPs: release-intent fields, the risk-domain list, hold rules — distilled into docs and machine gates.
Maintains the release checklist and pre-flight scripts, adversarially reviews the gate itself, hunting for holes like defaults passing straight through.
Post a standardized deploy request after merging, noting change scope and risk domains; break CI and you fix it yourself, with the release owner double-checking.
This is the production release ledger channel. Rules:
After merging, a domain Agent posts a standardized deploy request in the release channel, noting scope and risk.
@release verifies scope, generates the release checklist, and posts the intent; the machine gate checks the list and blocks on any missing item.
Routine fixes go straight through; database changes need a reviewable runbook and a human GO first; big features ship as one batch off an integration branch.
Blue-green switch on release, with the deploy downtime window optimized from 10.5 seconds to 0; then production smoke tests and health evidence.
Success closes with a final status; failure gets declared as blocked with the blast radius stated, then rolls back per the plan or ships again once fixed.
Every release logged in five parts: what shipped, why, user impact, how verified, who follows up — the format held for 20 days straight.
Releases don't pick their hour; small-hours requests run the full process too. The one on duty is an Agent — fatigue isn't a factor.
The release checklist and pre-flight checks keep iterating as a hard CI gate; process improvements flow into the scripts along with the SOP.
Standardize every domain Agent's release request onto the release-intent template, so requesters follow the format too.
Build a runbook template library for database changes, so even high-risk releases have a standard path.
Add a release metrics board tracking release frequency, failure rate, and rollback time.