It's 11:00 pm. Do you know where your AI agent is?

As someone whose name pops up when you search for "AI writers", I get unsolicited AI-related emails. Not all of them are considerate of my time, but usually people don't send me 6 emails within a minute.An AI agent, as it turns out, will send out six emails a minute. What's an AI agent? Definitions vary a lot, but essentially it's a text generator whose output, instead of sitting in a window for its user to review, goes straight into another program and tells it to do something. That something could be reading the contents of a file on the user's computer, running another program, doing a web search and reading the results, deleting the contents of a file on the user's computer, or buying a sofa using the user's credit card.You can see why it's important to have guardrails on what the AI agent can do. If you give the AI agent the power to delete files, there's no way to tell it "but only do that when it makes sense". The safe thing to do is to only give it access to commands it's safe…