Your AI agent does not need a principal engineer's permissions

Description and use

<p>I use AI agents for real work and I think they are the biggest change to how software gets built since version control. I want to say that first, because the rest of this is going to sound like a complaint, and the complaint is narrow. It is about what we hand them access to.</p> <p>It starts with letting an agent read the codebase, which is fine. Then it gets a deploy key so it can set up infrastructure, because typing the Terraform by hand felt slow. Then someone wires it into the security scanner with an admin token so it can "review vulnerabilities and fix them". At each step the agent

Problem

<p>I use AI agents for real work and I think they are the biggest change to how software gets built since version control. I want to say that first, because the rest of this is going to sound like a complaint, and the complaint is narrow. It is about what we hand them access to.</p> <p>It starts with letting an agent read the codebase, which is fine. Then it gets a deploy key so it can set up infrastructure, because typing the Terraform by hand felt slow. Then someone wires it into the security scanner with an admin token so it can "review vulnerabilities and fix them". At each step the agent

Outcome

<p>I use AI agents for real work and I think they are the biggest change to how software gets built since version control. I want to say that first, because the rest of this is going to sound like a complaint, and the complaint is narrow. It is about what we hand them access to.</p> <p>It starts with letting an agent read the codebase, which is fine. Then it gets a deploy key so it can set up infrastructure, because typing the Terraform by hand felt slow. Then someone wires it into the security scanner with an admin token so it can "review vulnerabilities and fix them". At each step the agent

Evidence

Your AI agent does not need a principal engineer's permissions

Source