My question: in a real production environment, what’s your enforcement point that the agent cannot bypass? Like, what actually guarantees the tool call isn’t executed unless it passes policy?
Some specific things I’m curious about:
Are you enforcing permissions inside each tool wrapper, at a gateway/proxy, or via centralized policy service?
How do you handle identity + authorization when agents act on behalf of users?
Do you log decisions separately from execution logs (so you can answer “why was this allowed?” later)?
How do you roll out enforcement safely (audit-only/shadow mode -> enforcement)?
What failure modes hurt most like policy bugs, agent hallucinations, prompt injection, or tool misuse?
Would love to hear how people are doing this in practice (platform/security/infra teams especially)
kxbnb•1w ago
The key insight: policy evaluation has to happen outside the agent's context. If the agent can reason about or around the policy, it's not really enforcement. So we treat it like a firewall - deterministic rules, no LLM in the decision path.
What we've found works: - Argument-level rules, not just tool-level ("github.delete_branch is fine, but only for feature/* branches") - Rate limits that reset on different windows (per-minute for burst, per-day for cost) - Explicit rule priority for when constraints conflict
The audit trail piece is critical too. Being able to answer "why was this blocked?" after the fact builds trust with teams rolling this out.
Curious what failure modes people have actually hit - is it more "agent tried something it shouldn't" or "policy was too restrictive and blocked legitimate work"?