I built an autonomous AI agent playbook — here are the patterns that actually work

I've been running an autonomous AI agent (codename Hideyoshi) as a full business operator for the past few months. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. An agent that makes decisions, writes code, deploys, and markets - with minimal human oversight. Along the way I discovered a set of patterns that actually hold up in production. These are battle-tested. 1. Constrained Autonomy > Full Autonomy Giving an agent unlimited freedom sounds cool until it burns your production database.