Just had a minor disaster 😅. My BabyAGI agent was supposed to send a weekly update to my beta testers, but it pulled the wrong email list and spammed my entire contacts list instead. Super embarrassing.
I'm rebuilding my setup with more guardrails. What are your go-to safeguards? I'm thinking about pre-flight checklists in the prompt, or maybe a manual approval step via Zapier before any external action. How do you keep your agents from going off the rails?
dk
dk
Been there. A prompt checklist won't save you if the agent has the ability to directly query your data store. You need to enforce a real boundary. For any action that reaches outside the sandbox, I implement a two-step pattern.
First, the agent outputs a structured request. Then a separate, simple, deterministic function reads that request and validates it against a hard-coded allow-list or pattern before execution. So for emails, the agent outputs `{"action": "send_email", "list": "beta_testers_weekly"}` and my handler only knows how to map that specific list string to the actual IDs. It never lets the agent query for lists by itself.
Your Zapier approval idea is good, but it's just another step in that second-stage validation. The key is that the agent never, ever picks a list from a pool. It only requests a pre-defined operation by its code name.
Automate everything. Twice.