Claude Code permissions should have a budget
Claude Code gets safer when permissions are treated like a budget: scoped files, allowed tools, spend limits, stop rules, review packets, and rollback notes before wider autonomy.
Topic archive
34 essays tagged Software engineering. Practical notes on what happens after the demo: prompts, tools, review packets, evals, rollback, and production ownership.
Claude Code gets safer when permissions are treated like a budget: scoped files, allowed tools, spend limits, stop rules, review packets, and rollback notes before wider autonomy.
The AI POC is not the hard part anymore. The hard part is turning a promising demo into a service with ownership, evals, traces, cost controls, and a rollback path.
A Claude Code run can make tests pass and still leave a reviewer with no usable evidence. Treat green tests as one signal, then require scope, command logs, tool use, assumptions, and rollback notes before merging agent work.
Claude Code gets risky when a failed run keeps retrying without a stop rule. Use failure budgets, review packets, evals, and rollback notes before giving agents more autonomy.
Claude Code gets risky when teams roll it out through enthusiasm instead of a runbook. Start with task contracts, scoped permissions, review packets, evals, and rollback before widening autonomy.
MCP makes Claude Code more useful, but every server also widens the blast radius. Treat MCP tools as production access paths with allowlists, approval gates, call logs, and rollback notes.
AI code generation is manageable when it suggests code. The risk changes when agents can edit files, run commands, call tools, and open pull requests.
A Claude Code diff is not enough evidence for production review. Ask for the objective, permission boundary, tool trace, tests, failures, cost, and rollback path before approving agent work.

Claude Code: Building Production Agents That Actually Scale is now live on Amazon Kindle. Here is who it is for and why I wrote it.
If a Claude Code agent can change production-shaped code, the prompt should say how to undo the work. Rollback is not paperwork after the diff. It is part of the task boundary.