I built a personal "Agentic OS" that runs my DBA work — with approval gates, audit trails, and a $0.01 morning brief

I'm an Oracle Apps DBA. My whole job is built on one instinct: nothing touches a production system without me knowing exactly what it's about to do.

So when I started building AI agents to run my daily work, I refused to do the usual thing — hand a model a shell and hope. Instead I spent the time building a small operating system around the agents. Here's what came out of it.

(2-min demo: launching a live DB diagnostic, watching the agent think in real time, and the moment an agent tries to write a file and gets frozen by the approval gate.)

What it actually does

Six agents ("skills"), each a folder with a manifest and a prompt:

• ebs-dba — read-only Oracle/EBS diagnostics: AWR summaries, top SQL, blocking sessions
• patch-triage — parses Oracle CPU advisories, filters to my stack (19c + EBS R12.2.11), buckets by urgency, CISA KEV first
• daily-brief — wakes at 7:00, checks DB health + git status across my projects, sends me a digest. Runs on Haiku. Costs about one cent.
• research — fan-out web search with citations and cross-checked claims
• project-runner — build/test/deploy tasks (deploys always need my approval)
• content-pipeline — drafts content; structurally incapable of publishing anything

Adding a skill = dropping in a folder:

# skills/ebs-dba/manifest.yaml
name: ebs-dba
description: Read-only Oracle/EBS diagnostics - reports findings only
triggers: [awr, top sql, blocking, tablespace]
model: claude-opus-4-8
tools: [oracle-dba.*]        # glob allowlist against MCP tools
risk: read-only              # read-only | write | spend | prod-touch
requires_approval: false
schedule: null               # or a cron expression

The part I actually care about: the permission model

The AI was the easy part. The trust model is the product.

Every tool registers with a tier: read, write, spend, or prod-touch. The kernel enforces gates from the tier — never from anything the model says:

• read runs automatically (all Oracle tools register as read; there is no write path to the database at all)
• everything else halts with a dry-run preview and waits for an explicit yes
• unattended runs (cron) can't prompt anyone — so gated calls park in a queue and notify me
• an approval matches the exact arguments, hashed, single-use. Approving npm run build can never be replayed as rm -rf
• a gate that can't read stdin fails closed

The tier of a shell command is decided per-call:

# "git status", "pytest", "npm run build"  -> read, runs free
# "vercel --prod", "terraform apply"       -> spend, hard gate
# anything else                            -> write, gated
# sqlite3 is allowed only if the SQL is SELECT-only:
if cmd.startswith("sqlite3 ") and "select" in cmd.lower() \
        and not SQLITE_WRITE_RE.search(cmd):
    return Tier.READ

Fun fact: my first live test caught a real hole here. The model ran sqlite3 -header -column ... — flags I hadn't anticipated — and a lazy prefix rule I'd written would have let a DELETE through unprompted. The test suite now has a regression case for it. Live runs find what unit tests don't.

Everything is audited, to the cent

Every run writes to SQLite and a per-run JSONL file: every model turn, every tool call with arguments and duration, every approval decision, and the token cost accumulating turn by turn.

$ agentos runs
  20260705-0027  daily-brief   done   6264/723 tokens   $0.0099
  20260705-0022  research      done   115606/3411       $0.6633
  20260705-0020  patch-triage  done   25647/3659        $0.2197

That research run cost 66 cents — and I know it to four decimal places, because an agent platform without cost accounting is a platform you'll turn off the first time a bill surprises you.

The dashboard

A FastAPI app on localhost (single HTML file, zero CDNs, nothing leaves the machine) that tails the audit log over SSE. Launch a run from any terminal and you watch it think live in the browser: MCP server connects, the actual SQL it ran, the cost ticking up, and — when it hits a gate — a red approval card with the dry-run JSON and approve/deny buttons.

Stack

• Python 3.12+, dependencies pinned with uv — anthropic, mcp, typer, apscheduler, fastapi, pyyaml, rich
• Claude Opus 4.8 for reasoning-heavy skills, Haiku 4.5 for cheap/frequent ones (the router and the morning brief)
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) for tools — my existing mcp-oracle-dba server plugs in with one YAML entry
• SQLite for memory, run history, and the approvals queue
• APScheduler + launchd for unattended scheduled runs
• 30 tests, including an end-to-end kernel loop against a real MCP server over stdio

What's next

The current version answers when asked and runs on schedule. The next one notices things on its own: a sentinel loop polling a live database every few seconds — blocking sessions, tablespace pressure, concurrent-request backlogs — that triggers an investigation agent automatically and delivers a root-cause report before I'd have opened a terminal. Real database, real locks, zero prompts typed.

That's the next post. If you've built approval gates or agent audit trails differently, I'd genuinely like to hear how — this pattern feels like something we should be converging on as an industry.

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Questions about the permission model or the MCP wiring? Ask below — I'll answer everything.