Bot Contracts: Make Your Automated Agents Accountable

Automations act like invisible teammates: they make requests, change state, and fail at odd hours—but rarely carry explicit responsibility. This episode introduces the Bot Contract: a tiny, copy‑paste artifact you attach to any automation so business expectations and operational realities meet before trouble begins. Mirko opens with a short vignette (a pricing-bot that retried customers into double‑charges), contrasts what business expects from an 'always-on' agent with what engineering actually needs to operate one safely, and reads a live one‑line Bot Contract on air (Intent; Owner; Retry policy; Observable signal; Human fallback; Cost cap; Sunset). Listeners leave with a 7‑day pilot: attach contracts to five automations, run an observability watch window, and measure incident count and mean time to human handoff. Practical, tool‑agnostic, and immediate: make your bots accountable and keep human attention where it matters. CTA: attach a Bot Contract this week and leave a review if it reduced surprise pages.

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