Tool Scoping and Least Privilege: Making the Dangerous Thing Impossible

Containment, part one — the permission surface. Because the model can be talked into anything, the runtime has to make the dangerous action impossible: read-only defaults, parameter constraints enforced in code, scoped short-lived credentials, egress allowlists in infrastructure, and gates that bind to exact parameters.

Content current as of 2026-09.

Lessons

  1. Preferences and controls
  2. Scoping the toolset: four dials
  3. Egress control: the trifecta-breaker
  4. Gates and brakes
  5. A hardening pass on the support agent