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# Codifying Trade-offs: Security, Cost, and Compliance as Agent Guardrails


- **Date:** Friday, Sep 25, 2026
- **Time:** 11:40–12:10 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 6
- **Event:** World Congress 2026 North America

## Description

Every agent demo ends the same way: the agent does the thing, the audience claps, nobody asks what happened to the security review.

I didn't just theorize about codifying trade-offs. I built an open-source multi-agent system that does it. Git-Ape (github.com/Azure/git-ape) is a platform engineering framework where specialized agents plan, validate, and deploy Azure infrastructure — and where nothing reaches production without passing through explicit guardrails enforced by the system itself.

Here's how it actually works. A requirements gatherer agent interviews the human. A template generator produces infrastructure-as-code. Then, before anyone confirms anything, a security analyzer runs a blocking gate — deployment is structurally impossible until issues are resolved. A cost estimator prices the deployment so humans confirm with real numbers, not vibes. A Principal Architect agent runs a Well-Architected Framework review across all five pillars. Only after all of that does a human see the full picture and explicitly approve. After deployment, a drift detector closes the evidence loop: did what we deployed stay the way we deployed it?

The key insight isn't that we added checks. It's that we made trade-offs consumable by agents. Security policy isn't a PDF — it's policy-as-code that agents evaluate natively. Cost thresholds aren't guidelines — they're hard constraints. Compliance isn't an audit you do later — it's a gate you pass through now.

I'll walk through the architecture, the failures that shaped it, and the design principles that transfer to any multi-agent system where the stakes are real. If your agents can deploy but can't be told no, you don't have guardrails. You have a demo.

## Speaker

### [Suzanne Daniels](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@suzanne-daniels)

Chief Developer Advisor at Microsoft


## Related talks at this congress

- [Give the Agent a Budget, Not a Token](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1695-give-the-agent-a) — Sachin Malhotra
- [Manufacturing trust: speed and safety in the age of agents](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1870-manufacturing-trust) — Mark Cavage
- [Supply Chain Security When Agents Write the Code](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1920-supply-chain) — Ajeet Raina
- [Closing the Visibility Gap: Lessons from Safety Critical Agentic Systems](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1408-closing-the) — Vivek Pandit

## Watch remotely

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## Links

- [Get tickets](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress-north-america/tickets)