Last week an agent I was testing wrote a cleanup step that looked like rm -rf ./node_modules and was actually rm -rf ~/node_modules — a directory that, on my laptop, does not exist, but ~ very much does. Nothing bad happened. I got lucky. That's the whole story, and it's not a strategy.
There's been a lot of talk this week about giving AI agents more tools and what happens when the boundaries fail. My small-team answer to that isn't a policy document — it's physics. If the code runs somewhere that has nothing worth losing, the blast radius is the size of the box, and the box is disposable.
So I moved my agent experiments off my laptop and onto a throwaway server. This post is the setup: about 20 minutes, one provisioning script, and a five-point smoke test I run before I let any agent-generated command execute there.
The setup in one paragraph
I used MonkeyCode's free model access as the agent's brain and their free server option as the disposable host, since that's what I already had on hand for side-project experiments.
