Architectural guardrails for safe AI agents: read-only defaults and human-in-the-loop mutations

Short summary

A practical guide to building AI agents that can't accidentally destroy production systems. The core principle: start every agent as read-only, promote to write access only when proven necessary, and route all mutations through a human-approval gate at the architectural level. Additional patterns include intent re-expression for approvals, cooldown periods for high-risk actions, and idempotent mutations to prevent runaway retry loops.

• •Default to read-only agent access; promote to write only when proven necessary
• •Route all mutations through human-approval gates, not just prompt-level instructions
• •Use idempotent operations and cooldown periods to prevent runaway agent loops

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.