Agent Guardrails Belong in Config, and Config Needs Tests

When an AI agent can run shell commands in your pipeline, its permissions are infrastructure. They should be declared where reviewers look, versioned with the agent, and tested on every change. Docker Agent gets the first two right. The third is up to you, and when I wrote the tests, one widely used permission pattern failed in a way worth knowing about.

The setup

Docker Agent is Docker's open-source runtime for teams of agents. A team is a config file: models, agents, which agents each one may delegate to, which tools each may use, and the policy around all of it. You run it with docker agent run crew.yaml.

My test project, release-gate-crew, is a release gate for container services. A lead agent delegates to a container auditor and a pipeline auditor, then hands their findings to a scribe that writes a PASS/BLOCK report. The sample service under review...

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