Anatomy of an Aegis risk note.

A line-by-line dissection of the one-page artifact the on-call engineer reads before every release. Risk class, blast radius, rollback target, the evals that ran, the one thing to watch.

Every release through Aegis produces exactly one document the on-call engineer is required to read. It fits on a single screen. It is generated, not hand-written at 1am. Here is the whole thing, taken apart.

RISK NOTE · REL-2261 01 / RISK CLASS Low Reversible. No schema change. 02 / BLAST RADIUS 1 service · 1 region Checkout read path only. 03 / ROLLBACK TARGET REL-2259 One command. < 90s. READS 04 / EVALS THAT RAN · Regression suite — pass · Safety probes — pass · Latency budget — pass AI · GENERATED 05 / WATCH p99 on /cart for 30 min. Alert wired to on-call. HUMAN · DECIDES ON-CALL SIGN-OFF Go / no-go One human reads. One human decides.
The five sections of a risk note and the loop they feed — generated by Aegis, signed off by a person.

Section 1 — Risk class.

The class is the first thing because it sets how hard you read the rest. Low means reversible with no data migration. Medium means reversible but with a coordination cost. High means there is a one-way door somewhere in the change, and the note will say exactly where. Aegis assigns a draft class from the diff; a human can raise it but never silently lower it.

Sections 2 and 3 — Blast radius and rollback target.

Blast radius answers "if this is wrong, who feels it." One service, one region, one read path is a different night than every customer at once. The rollback target is a specific prior release — not "revert," but a named build the on-call can pin in under ninety seconds.

A rollback target you have to go find at 2am is not a rollback target. It's a wish.

Section 4 — The evals that ran.

This is the part AI generates and the part people trust least until they've watched it catch something. The note lists each eval suite and its verdict — regression, safety probes, latency budget. Nothing here is a summary judgment. It's the receipts.

Section 5 — The one thing to watch.

Every note ends with a single sentence the on-call should hold in their head for the next thirty minutes. Not a dashboard. One metric, one window, one wired alert. If we can't name the one thing, the release isn't ready.

  • The note is one page because attention is the scarce resource, not pixels.
  • AI drafts every section; a human owns the go decision.
  • "Boring" means the on-call already knew what to watch before they clicked deploy.

— Silicon Prime team. May 2026.

All posts Read next: Onboarding day for a new enterprise delivery pod

Comments