A Copilot Studio maker is starting a new agent project that will eventually be deployed to production through formal pipelines. What is the recommended first step from an ALM perspective before building any agent topics or knowledge sources?

The recommended first step is to create a new dedicated unmanaged solution in the development environment before building any agent topics or knowledge sources. When you create agents, flows, tables, or connectors within a solution context, those components are automatically associated with the solution and tracked for deployment. Unmanaged solutions are used in development environments for authoring. When you deploy, the solution is exported as a managed solution and imported into test/production. Managed solutions protect components from direct editing in target environments, enforcing the deployment-only change model. Building the complete agent in the default solution, then migrating it to a managed solution later, creates technical debt. Components built in the default solution are not associated with any specific solution, and moving them later requires using 'Add existing' and risks missing dependencies. The migration step of adding all components after the fact is error-prone and may miss indirect dependencies. Publishing the agent directly to production to verify requirements, then documenting and versioning it, is a direct violation of ALM principles. Production should never be the first place you build or test. Cloning an existing production agent and using it as the starting template in the default solution creates the same unmanaged/untracked problem as building in the default solution first. Exam ALM first step: create dedicated unmanaged solution → build everything inside it → export as managed → deploy via pipeline.