A month into building autonomous agents at Eko, the question I get most, from engineers and from people who just heard the phrase "AI writing to a bank database," is some version of: are you out of your mind?
It is a fair thing to ask. We run an autonomous agent that resolves real support tickets against a production financial system. It reads a request, works out what to do, and makes the actual change to live records. Nobody clicks go.
This post is the whole stack, not the highlight reel. The credential-free agent and the deterministic core that make a write safe. The vault we compile instead of retrieve. The revamp that taught the system to act on what the model already understood. The operator that runs the whole thing. And the research loop that improves the system without me in the room. I am going to go deep on each, because the interesting part is how the pieces hold each other up.
One idea sits under all of it:
The model decides what to propose. Plain, deterministic code decides whether it is allowed and how it runs. The model never holds the keys.
