The Production-Ready AI Agent Checklist (Updated For 2026)

The most useful HN thread this week wasn't a product launch. It was a question:

"Ask HN: What makes an AI agent framework production-ready vs. a toy?"

The answers were more practical than I expected. Not "uses Kubernetes" or "has enterprise support." The community pointed at specific, buildable behaviors. I went through the thread and turned it into a checklist you can run against your OpenClaw setup today — with the specific OpenClaw primitives that implement each item.

The Checklist