Today is an important day for LaunchDarkly and our customers: We’re launching AgentControl, a new solution that helps teams control not just code in production, as we have for over a decade, but also the AI agents acting on their behalf.
AgentControl gives teams one place to configure, evaluate, observe, and control agents in production, without building or stitching together separate tools.
This is more than a new product for us. It reflects a broader shift in how software is built, released, and improved in this era of AI, and how LaunchDarkly is evolving to support you into the future.
Why we started LaunchDarkly
I cofounded LaunchDarkly in 2014 to solve a problem I’d experienced firsthand. As an engineering manager and product manager, I’d felt the pain of bad releases, software that missed the mark, and customers left angry or disappointed.
We built LaunchDarkly to help teams separate deployment from release so they could roll out changes safely, measure impact, and iterate quickly. It was the tool I wanted, not just to de-risk releases, but to ensure the right functionality reached the right users at the right time.
Over the past decade, we’ve helped thousands of customers move from infrequent, high-risk, all-or-nothing releases to continuous delivery. Today, software teams can ship in minutes, learn in real time, and improve continuously with confidence and control.
That core idea of reducing risk and speeding up the cycle from idea to production hasn’t changed. But AI has fundamentally changed and accelerated software development.
AI has introduced new challenges
Everything is moving faster—faster than teams can manually review, validate, and control.
In 2024, LaunchDarkly introduced guarded releases to help teams deal with the increase of AI-built code. By tying releases to critical metrics, guarded releases gave teams automated runtime control for code, with the system detecting issues in production and automatically taking action before customers were impacted or teams needed to intervene.
That was the first wave of change, but now we’re entering the second. Agents are being put to work in production at scale—from customer-facing experiences to back-end operations—making decisions, taking action, and evolving over time.
Agents don’t fail like traditional software. They drift. Models update, context shifts, and behavior changes without a single line of code changing. Pre-production controls can’t stop this, and the standard playbook—detect, fix, redeploy—breaks down for AI systems that never stop evolving.
When agents behave, they’re incredibly powerful. When they misbehave, they create unacceptable risk. You can’t catch this before production. You have to control it in production.
What we're launching
AgentControl is our control plane for AI systems in production.
With AgentControl, teams can define prompts, models, tools, and parameters as runtime-changeable AI configs—versioned and updated without redeploys. Teams can experiment and validate changes offline against their own datasets, then continuously evaluate live traffic in production for latency, cost, quality, and behavioral drift.
Those real-time signals can then trigger automated action through guarded releases: rerouting traffic, rolling back changes, adjusting configurations, or shutting down problematic behavior before customers are impacted.
Most AI tooling helps you observe and evaluate. AgentControl helps you ship and control, closing the loop from signal to action without waiting through a deploy cycle. And all of this runs on the same battle-hardened delivery infrastructure that powers 50 trillion evaluations a day for thousands of the world's largest and most innovative companies.
AgentControl is already helping teams govern and scale agents, optimize AI spend and performance, and continuously experiment and improve in production, including our own teams here at LaunchDarkly.
We believe this is the foundation for a new generation of software systems that can safely heal themselves and continuously optimize toward better outcomes.
Runtime control for code and agents
Runtime control for both code and agents helps teams move faster and safer, and fully realize the value from AI.
In this new era, the best teams will stay in control, setting goals and guardrails while using agents that ship continuously, learn instantly, and adapt in real time. That’s the future we’re building toward.
We’re incredibly grateful to be building alongside you, and can’t wait to see what you create.
Please join us at our launch event on June 11 at 10 a.m. PT to learn more about AgentControl and check out our updated website—we’ve put a little more color into LaunchDarkly!
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