Agent that refuses to run commands without human approval
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In light of recent news about an agent deleting a production database, I thought now would be a good time to share this.As the use of AI tools in production is becoming more common, sadly so will the high profile incidents like the one mentioned.Fewshell is a terminal agent specifically designed to avoid this.There is no setting to enable command auto-approval. This is by-design, so that the user never has to second-guess or worry about accidentally having it enabled.Originally my intention was to build an AI mobile terminal to make typing shell commands easy. But with so many mobile-enabled 'claw' agents being available, I decided to make Fewshell the opposite of an autonomous agent.Please star if you like, let me know what you think. Happy to answer questions.About me: I'm an ex Amazon Sr. SDE for Alexa AI, and currently am working in AI safety research for agentic RLVR. I use this tool to run and check on my lab experiments.
HN · launched Apr 30, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 36%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent guardrail software · 201 launches, 25 in the last 7 days ▲ +25% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 201 launches in ai agent guardrail software →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a CLI wrapper around LLM execution that intercepts proposed terminal commands and presents an interactive human-in-the-loop approval prompt before execution.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Sandboxing insufficient for agents needing legitimate write access (payments, DB), Per-command approval removes 90% of agent benefits, Approval prompts cause decision fatigue similar to dialog box clicking, Agents will inevitably make mistakes with production access, Risk of catastrophic failures if agent has too many permissions/tool integrations
Feature requests: Access control layer between permission grant and execution, Automatic thresholds/circuit breakers to trip on risky actions, Sandboxed/isolated environments with data replication instead of direct access
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 610 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #262 of 611 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 177 days after the earliest competitor.
- I built a firewall for agents because prompt engineering isn't security · hn · 2026-01-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Agentwall · ph · 2026-09-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I spent 3 months making desktop automation stop lying to AI agents · hn · 2026-08-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- lessloc · ph · 2026-10-22 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- AILA · hn · 2026-02-16 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- AgentPort · hn · 2026-04-29 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Quiel · ph · 2026-10-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Clor · hn · 2026-06-02 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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