From My Desk

From My Desk

Ideas I'm working through

From My Desk is where I think through ideas at the intersection of AI, engineering, architecture, security and leadership.

Sometimes an idea becomes an article. Sometimes I build a small Lab to see whether it holds up in practice. The goal is not to present every answer as finished, but to make the thinking visible enough to examine, question and improve.

Written and built by Angesh Vikram.

The Desk Index

Start with the latest Lab, or browse the earlier articles, Labs and experiments that led to it.

Latest Lab · Lab 006

The Agent Containment Boundary

What should happen when an agent no longer follows valid human direction—and how do we stop it without relying on the agent to stop itself?

Compare justified refusal with non-compliance and rogue evasion, then see how an independent control plane chooses Continue, Restrict, Isolate, or Terminate—using fictional Cedar Quill Markets data only.

The scenarios are fictional, and the Lab never modifies a real agent, credential, process, or tool session.

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Earlier Labs

Lab 005

Verifiable Action Receipts

A useful receipt binds intent, authority, judgment, execution, and outcome—not only an activity line.

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Lab 004

The Agent Escalation Boundary

A trustworthy agent is not one that always finishes the task. It recognizes when continuing alone would be unsafe.

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Lab 003

Agent Access Control

What changes when an agent does more than connect and begins acting through tools, data and delegated authority?

Explore Lab 003

Lab 002

Delegated Authority

What happens when an agent passes part of its authority to another agent? Follow the chain and see why authority may stay within the same boundary or become narrower at each handoff, but must never expand.

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Lab 001

Know Your Agent

Identity tells us which agent is acting. The first Lab explores why authority, limits and context still have to be evaluated before an action proceeds.

Explore Lab 001