Do your AI agents get full access to the terminal, or are they sandboxed for safety?

Hey everyone!

With autonomous coding agents and workflow automations making their way into real production systems, the biggest conversation in developer communities right now is all about runtime safety and sandboxing.

We're way beyond simple text prompts now — these agents can read local files, run terminal commands, install packages, and even run database queries. But giving AI that much unrestricted system access is risky. One bad file change or a hallucinating loop could wipe out data, leak credentials, or fire off API calls you never intended.

That's why we're seeing a lot of new dev tools focused on deterministic agent sandboxing. Developers are spinning up ephemeral micro-VMs, Docker containers, and permission proxies that make the agent ask for human approval before running anything destructive.

For those of you building or testing agent workflows — how are you handling permissions? Are you using strict manual approval gates, isolated throwaway containers, or just trusting the agent's built-in system prompt?