Harnesses and guardrails

Imagine a one-armed bandit. No, not a highwayman with a missing limb, but a slot machine. You pull the lever, the winning 777 combination appears, and the computer runs exactly the command you need right now. But if the winning combination doesn't come up... anything could happen. For some reason, you decide to keep pulling the lever anyway, but you get the feeling you should somehow minimize the unwanted side effects. That's how I picture AI models that can run arbitrary commands on your own machine, and although there are off-the-shelf solutions to keep them in check (such as Docker Sandboxes), we obviously have to build our own to dig a little deeper into how things work. The agent Pretty much every major provider has some kind of TUI called a harness or an agent (Codex, Claude Code, and the rest) with all the bells and whistles. I wanted something simpler, with as little magic as possible. I ended up going with Pi. Isolation will be handled by Docker (or in our case, Podman).…

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