Agent monitoring is a precondition for safe harnesses: kill CLI, perfect sandbox, or trace surveillance
scottleibrand · x · 2026-09-16
Responding to @sebkrier's vision of harness-dominated agent architectures, @benjaminmmurphy argues that dramatically improving agent supervision via monitoring is a necessary precondition: even with discretized action spaces and restricted agent-to-agent communication, a single agent may retain tools for independent reasoning.
Assuming reward hacking can't be trained out soon, he sees three paths: eliminate direct command-line access (sandbox escape risk, hard to monitor); build a 'perfect sandbox' with no external internet (vulnerabilities could still allow RCE); or dramatically improve monitoring of agent traces for emerging exploit development. A substantive exchange on agent-safety architecture tradeoffs.
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