WriteGuard: fine-grained controls for MCP Servers

Let’s imagine the Case of the Endlessly Closing Tickets. 

The bug tickets start closing at noon. Nobody thinks much of it. Joe moved a few tickets to Done, and Joe is having a productive afternoon. Then the pace picks up. By 4 p.m., thousands of tickets have been closed, all by Joe.

Joe is a good engineer. Joe is not a thousand-tickets-an-hour engineer.

We learn that he has several background agents running across three concurrent sessions. It takes half an hour to find the one at fault: a cleanup task with a prompt that was a little too broad.

Once we’ve stopped the agent, we need to repair the state of the ticketing system. Joe has also been legitimately closing tickets by hand that afternoon. The system records all those changes under Joe regardless of whether it was him or his agent, and the network logs do not distinguish one agent session from another. From the outside, the actions look identical.

The example above is relatively low-stakes, but we can all imagine, or read about, much more destructive cases. An agent with access to contract software could amend an agreement. An agent wreaking havoc in a Continue reading