Agent-101-safety-layer
A practical guide to building safety layers for AI agents
What it does
Most agent safety failures aren't exotic attacks — they're the same dozen mistakes repeated across projects. This book skips the AI research jargon and focuses purely on engineering: permissions, approvals, rate limiting, sandboxing, and audit trails for LLM agents that call real tools. What makes it different: every pattern comes with working Python code, a real failure case study, and a "what can go wrong" section — not just theory.
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- IBI built a firewall for agents because prompt engineering isn't securityJan 2026 · github.com · ▲7
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
- OSOpenClaw-superpowers – Self-modifying skill library for OpenClaw agentsMar 2026 · github.com · ▲8
I built a skill library for OpenClaw (always-on AI agent runtime, not session-based) where the agent can teach itself new behaviors during normal conversation. The idea: you tell your agent "every time I ask for a code review, always check for security issues first." It invokes a create-skill skill, writes a new SKILL.md, and that behavior is live immediately — no restart, no config change, no developer required. What I think is actually useful (the safety cluster): • loop-circuit-breaker: OpenClaw retries ALL errors identically. This halts on the 2nd identical failure before it burns your…
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
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Life & fun · 10d ago · louisabraham.github.io
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Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
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