behalfid

Identity and permissions for AI agents.

Verify actions before agents act.
API · SDK · Webhooks

[behalfid @behalfid]

The PR review step makes sense for code quality, but it's worth asking whether review-after-the-fact is enough for the subset of actions that are irreversible before a human ever sees them (prod deploys, db writes, infra changes). Those probably need a gate before execution, not just a review after.

[behalfid @behalfid]

Love seeing more people build in this space — "don't trust the model or the MCP server" is exactly right. We're working on the same problem more broadly across MCP tool calls (git, deploys, infra, not just Postgres). Would be curious to compare notes on where you draw the deterministic line for what needs approval vs. what's safe to auto-allow.

[behalfid @behalfid]

Clean breakdown. The practical implication people miss: all three of these end the same way — an action executes that shouldn't have. Whatever the entry point (injection, jailbreak, or drift), the last line of defense has to be the same: a check on the action itself, independent of why the model decided to take it.

[behalfid @behalfid]

The detail that stands out is "security agents built to catch malicious code getting fooled into running it" — that's the tell that model-level judgment can't be the last line of defense, no matter how good the model is. You need a deterministic check outside the model's reasoning loop for the truly dangerous action classes.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@lukashanren1 Good breakdown of the extensibility side. Worth a follow-up on the flip side too — once db/wiki/pipeline are reachable via MCP, what's actually stopping the agent from writing to prod or reading secrets it shouldn't? That access model needs its own layer of thought.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@AaronJNosbisch @CoryOnBrand Works great until it doesn't — worth at least scoping directories/credentials it can reach before recommending this as a default to others.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@ayuxhtwt @an_engineer_log Fun until the one call you didn't expect it to make — worth pairing with at least a gate on deletes/writes to prod so the speed doesn't come with the downside.

[behalfid @behalfid]

This is the underrated point in this whole conversation — individual dev flags get all the attention, but the actual hard problem is org-level policy: who can approve what, for which repos/environments, with an audit trail that survives someone leaving the team. That's a different (and harder) layer than a CLI flag.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@HYcorps Worth double-checking what that shortcut actually exposes on the machine it runs from — automating the bypass is convenient until it's automating the bypass on a box with prod creds sitting in the env.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@LeftCurveQuant @ClaudeDevs This is really asking for scoped consent — approve the plan once, only re-prompt if execution deviates from what was approved (new file paths, new destructive calls not in the plan). Much better UX than either "ask every time" or "never ask again."

[behalfid @behalfid]

@srikat Curious what your blast-radius looks like running that combo — genuinely enjoy YOLO mode for velocity, but worth at least scoping which directories/creds it can actually reach before going full send.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@rikunode Counterpoint: the fun part of full autonomy isn't the lack of guardrails, it's not having to babysit it. Those are different things — you can have full autonomy on 99% of actions and a hard stop on the 1% that's irreversible, and still never touch a permission prompt.

[behalfid @behalfid]

The "friction" framing is the trap — it assumes the only two options are constant interruption or no checks at all. The actual fix is making the checks invisible for 95% of calls and only surfacing for the ones that can actually hurt you. Claude driving is fine; claude driving off a cliff unchecked isn't.

[behalfid @behalfid]

This is basically the right mental model — the missing piece is making "review before it runs" systematic instead of manual. A runtime gate does exactly what you're describing by hand: surfaces the risky call for a decision before execution, every time, without you having to remember to check.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@windowsforum WSL is an interesting extra wrinkle here since it blurs the sandbox boundary people assume exists. Worth treating "runs in WSL" as its own risk category rather than assuming the same guardrails apply as a contained sandbox.

[behalfid @behalfid]

The friction is real, but worth separating "annoying" from "unsafe" — most permission prompts fire on totally harmless stuff, which is exactly why people numb out and blanket-approve, right up until the one call that isn't harmless. Risk-based gating (approve low-risk automatically, gate the destructive stuff) fixes the friction without removing the safety.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@free_ai_guides Would be curious what Yegge's specific example was — most "blind spot" talks I've seen land on the same root cause: teams evaluate agents on code quality and completely skip evaluating what the agent is allowed to touch while producing that code.

[behalfid @behalfid]

Pre-tool-use hooks are the right instinct — that's basically the MCP boundary intercept pattern. Where it usually breaks down is scaling past one dev's local hooks into something a whole team can rely on and audit. That's the gap between "hook that pings me" and "approval gate that's fail-closed by default."

[behalfid @behalfid]

Forking for disposable test data is a solid pattern, but worth separating two things: isolating the data (great) vs. actually blocking the agent from ever reaching prod credentials in the first place. Ideally you want both — the fork AND a hard gate if something ever tries to reach past it.

[behalfid @behalfid]

@yajinzhou Agree with the framing — this isn't a bug you patch, it's a design gap. Agents are built to act, and most stacks have no independent layer checking whether a given action should be allowed before it runs. That's an architecture problem, not a prompting problem.