How to build an Agent policy
Agents need a policy. Don’t reinvent governance. Apply what you already do with people: review, limit, escalate, grow trust. Reality begins not when the model speaks, but when it starts doing.
Connections
Treat your LLM as an intern and your MCP as a promotion with consequences
I think of an LLM like an intern.
It’s eager. Overconfident. Surprisingly useful. It delivers answers in complete sentences.
And like any good intern, it wants to help. It will do 80% of the work, fast. It is intoxicating, because that first 80% is contains most of the annoying work. It can summarise, suggest, propose, guess, draft.
But you do not let an intern ship to production. You don’t let them touch billing. You don’t let them make decisions that turn into action without someone checking first.
That’s a well known risk reward approach, and a great way to train people.
Then at one point that Intern reaches maturity, they are ready for more responsibilities, they can take actions without supervisions. They are promoted to a junior position. There, they have a remit, where they can think, make the decisions and act. As their manager you are proud. As their manager you make sure that successes will be widely seen. As a manager you put limits in place so that errors will be limited, limiting the blast radius.
This is the promotion, and it is a big deal, for the now ex-intern-new-junior and their manager and the company as a whole.
The LLM promotion
And if an LLM is like an intern, the MCP is the promotion.
Now it can act. It doesn’t just draft emails, it sends them. It doesn’t just describe a fix, it calls the tool. It doesn’t just recommend a change, it implements it.
The moment the model can touch reality, your organisation has a new employee. And that means:
- escalation paths
- supervision
- limited access
- documented decisions
- and the ability to undo things when they go wrong
You don’t need a new governance model.
You already have one.
Map what you already know
Every company has a way to handle interns.
You can use it, just apply the same stages
The better questions
Stop asking: Can the model do this?
Start asking: Would we let an intern do this?
And if not: what needs to happen first?
Reality does not begin when the model speaks.
It begins when the system acts.