Notes on IAM, agent tools, and deployment pipelines, with examples to review and test in your own projects.
Treat filtering as one layer and design for the case where prompt injection succeeds. The "lethal trifecta" as a design check, architecture patterns that separate reading untrusted content from taking actions, and the controls that limit damage when they fail.
Read ArticleA multi-account setup a two-to-twenty person team can run without a platform team: which accounts to create, three service control policies worth having on day one, human access through IAM Identity Center, and CI access through OIDC.
Read ArticleCoding agents do better work in some repositories than others, and the difference is mostly things that help human contributors too: one command that runs the agreed checks, fast feedback, clear ownership boundaries and short, specific instructions.
Read ArticleA refund request times out, the retry succeeds, and the test is green. Is it safe to ship? Inspect a synthetic trace, ask for the missing evidence, and run a local regression that exposes two effects for one approved operation.
Read ArticleModel spend is hard to control because it's hard to see: one invoice, many callers, and agent sessions whose cost varies by orders of magnitude. The order that works is to attribute every call, cap spend per session and per caller, and only then optimise.
Read ArticleIf candidates will spend their days directing and reviewing coding agents, test that. A 45-minute exercise built around an agent-written pull request with planted problems, the rubric, and what it does and does not tell you.
Read ArticleAn eval pipeline for agents in three parts: cases built from real failures, graders that check actions and end state rather than wording, and repeated runs with thresholds set before the results come in. Includes a small with/without comparison you can run on a coding agent.
Read ArticleChoosing a runtime for agents on Google Cloud comes down to session length, GPUs and how much you want managed. The limits that decide it, and the IAM detail that matters most: iam.serviceAccounts.actAs, Google Cloud's equivalent of AWS's PassRole.
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