AI agents are only as useful as the tools they can safely touch

The AI coding story is starting to feel less like autocomplete and more like access control. That is the part developers should pay attention to. Better models matter, but a smarter agent is still stuck if it cannot reach the right repo, run the right command, inspect the right logs, or call the right internal API. Give it too much access and you have a different problem: an eager junior engineer with production credentials and no fear. Anthropic's last few days point in that direction. On May...