A Tool-Use Readiness release gate is a local-first, static pre-flight check that runs before an agent is promoted to staging, production-like, or production environments.
Agents Shipgate is the deterministic merge gate for AI-generated agent capability changes: the local-first, static Tool-Use Readiness review that runs at PR time. It focuses on what tools are attached, what schemas they expose, what scopes they require, what policies the manifest declares, and which release risks need human review.
- A CI-friendly scanner for
shipgate.yaml, local MCP exports, local OpenAPI specs, and optional SDK AST metadata. - A deterministic report of blockers, warnings, evidence, confidence, and recommended actions.
- A way to make agent release review repeatable before runtime traces exist.
- An LLM eval framework.
- An MCP runtime gateway.
- A runtime guardrail or policy enforcement proxy.
- An observability platform.
- A safety or compliance certification.
| Category | Difference |
|---|---|
| LLM evals | Evaluate behavior or outputs; Agents Shipgate reviews static tool-surface release risk. |
| Secret scanners | Detect leaked credentials; Agents Shipgate checks tool permissions, schemas, and policies. |
| Agent observability | Uses runtime traces after execution; Agents Shipgate runs before promotion. |
| MCP gateways | Control runtime access; Agents Shipgate produces release-review evidence. |
| Alternative | Gap Agents Shipgate Covers |
|---|---|
| Unit tests | Tests usually validate code paths, not the released tool surface and declared policies. |
| Code review | Reviewers miss generated specs, MCP exports, broad scopes, and missing approval policies. |
| Runtime traces | Useful later, but they arrive after behavior exists. Agents Shipgate runs before promotion. |
| Nothing | Tool-surface drift becomes a production surprise. |
For named comparisons against specific evaluators and platforms, see the marketing-site versus pages: vs evals, vs promptfoo, vs Braintrust, vs LangSmith, and vs observability platforms.