Give an AI Agent Write Access One Verb at a Time

Description and use

When giving an AI agent write access, classify actions by undo cost, log every decision, and roll out autonomy in stages starting with low‑risk verbs.

Problem

When an AI agent has write access, a single wrong action can cause irreversible damage, yet many teams lack a systematic way to decide which actions the agent can perform and how to monitor them.

Outcome

By classifying verbs, logging decisions, and staging rollout, the team achieved safe write access for AI agents, reducing accidental changes and enabling autonomous operations for low‑risk actions.

Workflow

• 1. List all verbs the agent can perform against named systems.
• 2. Sort verbs into free, awkward, and one‑way buckets based on undo cost.
• 3. Assign each verb a mode: dry_run, needs_approval, or autonomous.
• 4. Implement logging for every decision point, including declined actions.
• 5. Deploy in stages: start with dry_run to collect real traffic logs.
• 6. Move verbs to draft‑and‑approve, reviewing queued actions.
• 7. Graduate verbs to autonomous one at a time, applying caps and kill switches.
• 8. Monitor for silent skips and other failures, alerting on absence of action.

Evidence

The point is not the type. The point is that nobody can add a tool without answering "what does undo look like for this?" in the same pull request.

Source

Once the list is sorted, the approval gate goes at the line between awkward and one‑way.

Source

The rollout sequence below costs a couple of extra weeks, and it removes most of the argument about whether the agent is trustworthy, because it replaces opinions with a log.

Source