Agents Need Feature Flags - Sachin Gupta

Most AI teams ship behavior changes to 100% of users on every deploy — no canary, no segment, no kill switch. Web teams stopped doing this in 2012. AI teams are about to learn why.
Feature flags are table stakes in software engineering. In agent systems they're almost nonexistent — prompts, tool access, model selection, memory policy, and autonomy level all change globally the moment you ship. That's why your "small" prompt tweak just broke 12% of your users and you found out from a Discord screenshot.
This talk walks the feature-flag patterns agents specifically need — beyond the standard boolean-toggle. We'll cover segment-targeted prompt variants, per-tool access flags, model-routing flags, autonomy-level flags (suggest vs. auto-approve vs. auto-execute), memory-policy flags, and the kill switch every agent system should have on day one but almost none do.

Speakers:
- Sachin Gupta: Sachin Gupta is a Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years building backend platforms at internet scale, currently focused on the runtime trust boundaries that LLM coding agents blur and the creator of HeapLens, a Java heap analyzer extension used in 50+ countries.
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptasachin1/
  GitHub: https://github.com/sachinkg12