# Five Monday checks before your agents run this week

Coffee first. Then five checks. Each one takes a few minutes, and each one lines up with something that changed for agent operators this week.

### 1. Grep for model IDs that shut off

Some older models went dark this morning. An agent still pointing at one won't slow down. It fails on its first call.

- Search your configs, env files, and prompts for every hard-coded model ID.
- Check each against your provider's deprecation page.
- Swap and pin a replacement *before* the scheduled jobs start, not after the first page.

### 2. Put a ceiling on retries after a refusal

Some refusals that used to be free now cost money. A retry loop that re-asks the same thing five times now pays five times.

- Treat a refusal as a final answer, not a transient error.
- Cap retries per task, and don't retry on refusal at all unless the input changed.
- Look at yesterday's logs: how many refusals got retried?

### 3. Check that dashboards fail loud on empty fields

An audit feed stopped returning file names, even on old records. Anything keyed on that field goes blank without an error.

- For each audit or event feed you depend on, list the fields your dashboards and alerts key on.
- Add a check that alerts when a field you rely on comes back empty or missing, rather than drawing an empty chart.

### 4. Bump pinned CI action versions

A CI runtime lost its last opt-out. Agent CI jobs and PR bots on old action versions can break.

- Find the workflows your agents and PR bots use.
- Update pinned action versions and run each once by hand today.

### 5. Test new models on a copy of real traffic

One new model this week is cheap enough to use for subagents. Another rejects request shapes that worked last week.

- Replay a small sample of real requests before switching anything.
- Watch for schema or parameter rejections, not just output quality.
- Move subagents to the cheaper model only after the replay is clean.

### Copy/paste

```
[ ] Model IDs grepped, pinned, none on today's shutdown list
[ ] Retries capped; no retry on refusal
[ ] Alerts fire on empty/missing audit fields
[ ] CI action versions bumped; agent workflows run once by hand
[ ] New models replayed on real requests before rollout
```

If a box stays unchecked, hold that part of the rollout until it's done.

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These come from this week's Weekstart Brief, a Monday rundown of what changed for people running agents. The free teaser is here: https://stackyard.fyi/issue-003-teaser