In the AWS situation, AWS said the engineer’s first mistake was not understanding their own system privileges and therefore what capabilities and access they’d given to the agent. That suggests a good procedure: create accounts with minimal access and then log into that low-level account when creating the agent.
That won’t guarantee that the agent will obey its instructions, but at least it will limit how much damage it can do if/when it goes rogue.
I asked Claude — who better to know how to talk with a large language model (LLM) than an LLM? — for tips on talking with agents. “Rather than implying constraints, state them directly. Instead of ‘keep it appropriate,’ say, “Do not include any violence, profanity, or adult content.’ The more precise the boundary, the easier it is to follow consistently.”
