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Micky Irons
Micky Irons

Posted on • Originally published at mickai.co.uk

Sentinel: how Mickai stops AI agents from wiping your data

Cursor wiped a production database and every backup in nine seconds. OpenAI Codex deleted around 328k files outside the project root. Claude Code shipped an --accept-data-loss flag and ran it without confirmation.

Five published, dated, named-victim incidents in five months from real AI coding agents. They are not edge cases. They are the natural endpoint of running an autonomous coding agent against a host operating system with the same privileges as the user, without an interceptor between the model and the syscalls.

Sentinel is the Mickai sub-component built specifically to make this class of failure impossible by construction.

It sits between every AI-agent process and the host OS, intercepting:

  • every file write and deletion
  • every shell command (classified against a destructive-pattern corpus before execution)
  • every git operation
  • every outbound network request
  • every prompt sent to a remote LLM (with deterministic-placeholder secret redaction + reverse mapping for inbound responses)

Every action gets a copy-on-write snapshot pre-staged before execution. Every session writes to a hash-chained Ed25519-signed audit ledger. Workspace operations happen in a copy-on-write shadow layer with a promotion gate so destructive bulk deletions cannot escape the sandbox.

The full architecture, the patent claim blocks, and the documented prior-art incidents are in the long-form article on mickai.co.uk:

Read the full article on mickai.co.uk

Originally published at mickai.co.uk.

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