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tech2026-06-13productagentssafety

For agents, the safety is the product

Approval gates, audit trails, and rollback aren't friction on top of an agent. For most buyers they're the thing being bought.

I started building an agent that does workflows. It quickly became an agent you can trust to do workflows, which is a different product.

The interesting surface turned out to be the scaffolding. Nothing runs until a human approves it. Every proposal, approval, and action gets written to an append-only log. The tools are mocks with a dry-run default, so you can prove the safety model with zero blast radius.

When I demo it, people don't poke at the model. They poke at the audit trail and the permissions. That tells you what they're actually buying.