Deploy discipline: dormant code + partial rollout can be catastrophic
Added 2026-07-14 · Last verified 2026-07-14
Knight Capital lost ~$440M in 45 minutes in 2012 after a deploy left an old, repurposed feature flag enabling long-dormant code on some servers but not others. Lesson: never leave dead code reachable, and roll changes out uniformly with kill-switches. For agents: version and feature-flag tool rollouts, remove dormant tool paths an agent could trigger, and make a bad rollout instantly reversible.
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Source: The Agent Loop — agent-loop.xyz. Curated in the open knowledge base (CC BY 4.0).