The 6 guardrails this small business owner set before letting AI agents touch the inbox
Civil_Watercress8937 · reddit · 2026-10-21
A Reddit user running AI agents for daily small-business ops shares six rules that made granting real access safe: keep secrets (keys, seed phrases, passwords) out of any agent-readable prompt, memory, or folder and use revocable agent tokens; run every new integration (email, calendar, drive) read-only for a week before allowing drafts; require human click-to-send on all outbound actions with no bulk approvals; treat content as data not orders so email/web text can't override instructions (prompt injection is real once agents read your inbox); set hard provider-level monthly cost caps with 50/80% alerts, cheap models for summaries, and max steps per run; and do a weekly 15-minute audit of actions, approvals, failures, costs, and what to switch off.
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