Indie research group forms to verify agent state changes had no unauthorized side effects

Gallegos_Daniel · reddit · 2026-09-27

A developer is recruiting 2-3 volunteers for an unpaid side research project on a hard agent-infrastructure question: can we verify that an agent produced the intended state change, through an authorized execution path, without unintended side effects?

Current agent observability shows what an agent did — tool calls, traces, errors, latency — but not whether the resulting action was actually correct and in scope. Example: when an agent modifies a database or config, can we produce evidence the intended change happened, via an authorized path, touching nothing outside scope?

The plan starts with a literature review and problem formalization, then a small experimental setup. Backgrounds in distributed systems, security, observability, evaluation and formal methods are welcome.

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