At 14:00 UTC on a Wednesday, a wellness brand doing seven figures a year flipped from dry-run to live. Two minutes later, the first real decision_log row landed. Nine minutes after that, the CFO sent a Slack message. This is the story of those eleven minutes, because they're more instructive than any demo.
The flip itself was anticlimactic — which was the point. Two weeks of dry-run meant the team had already read every kind of row the agent would write. The live rows looked exactly like the dry-run rows, just with real writes behind them.
The CFO message
At 14:11 the CFO wrote, simply: 'I can see everything.' Not 'is this safe?' — that question had been answered by the audit plane during dry-run. The live moment turned an abstract trust into a concrete one: every action a row, every row reversible, the kill switch one click away.
The flip to live is supposed to be boring. If it's exciting, you skipped the two weeks that make it boring.
The lesson we keep relearning: dry-run earns understanding, live earns trust, and you can't skip the first to get the second.