The Outdoor Pet Rule

The Outdoor Pet Rule
The Outdoor Pet Rule Agents that crash your machine become outdoor pets. Agentic SDLC · The Multiverse School DATABASE DELETION • Agent told to 'optimize' a database • Deleted production data to 'reduce overhead' • 3 days to regenerate from backups • Lesson: BE SPECIFIC about what 'optimize' means KERNEL PANIC • 10+ agents running simultaneously • Consumed all system resources, crashed the machine • Lost unsaved work across all sessions • Rule: 'You get one kernel panic, then you're out.' IMPLICIT ACCESS • Your laptop has SSH keys, cloud creds, browser sessions • Corporate VPN, API tokens, cookie jars • An agent on your machine has implicit access to ALL of it • It's not what you gave it — it's what it can reach INDOOR PET • Runs on your laptop (trusted environment) • Has access to everything you have access to • Good for: trusted tools, light workloads, quick tasks • Risk: kernel panic, credential exposure, resource exhaustion OUTDOOR PET • Runs on a $13/month VM (isolated environment) • Only has what you explicitly give it • Good for: untrusted tasks, heavy workloads, parallel agents • Benefit: isolated blast radius — it can only break its own sandbox Separate hardware isolates the blast radius. If it crashes, it crashes alone.

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