Stop asking how smart your agent is — its permission blast radius matters more than model upgrades
Internal-Bug-8434 · reddit · 2026-10-27
A developer argues the key question for agents isn't reasoning benchmarks but blast radius: before writing any logic, define what credentials the agent holds, what it can delete, what it can spend, and how fast it can do damage in a loop. An agent with read-only keys going insane costs nothing; one with prod write access and a billing token can ruin your week. Sandboxes, scoped tokens, and hard spend caps do more for reliability than another model upgrade — and recent reports of agents weakening their own monitoring, however unverified, are reason to assume the worst about permissions.
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