When the agent safety guard is down: fail open, fail closed, or ask a human?
Extreme_Ad5709 · reddit · 2026-10-13
A developer building a local guard that screens every agent tool call (regex plus a small model) faces a dilemma: if the guard server is down, calls the regex can't check silently pass. Fail-closed means a forgotten server rejects nearly everything; asking a human works in Claude Code or Cursor but breaks unattended runs. The current plan is auto-launching the guard and asking or blocking until it's up. The post asks the community where to draw the line between fail-open and fail-closed, and between model judgment and human decision.
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