The mandate came down this morning: “Deploy the agents.”
Your VP of Engineering read a whitepaper. Now, she wants “Autonomous Refactoring Bots” crawling your legacy monolith to migrate it to microservices.
You, the Platform Engineer, know exactly what happens next.
One of those agents will hallucinate. It will confuse a DROP TABLE command for a cleanup script. And because it’s running with the permissions of the developer who spun it up, it will succeed.
We are entering the era of Agentic Infrastructure, but we are building it on tools designed for humans. And that is a security nightmare.
The “Localhost” Trap
When a human developer writes code, the feedback loop is slow. We write, we pause, we run tests locally. If localhost breaks, we fix it.
Agents don’t work like that.
Agents operate at machine speed. They don’t “pause.” They generate code, execute it, read the error, and retry—thousands of times per hour.
If you force agents to run on a developer’s laptop (localhost), you create a dependency hell. If you force them to run in a shared staging environment, you create a resource DDoS. 50 agents spinning up 50 integration test suites simultaneously will melt your CI pipeline.
So, where do they live?
The Hidden Kernel Problem
The fundamental issue is that agents need a runtime to verify their own work.
An agent cannot “think” its way to correct code. It must “try” its way there. It needs to execute the shell script, run the migration, ping the API.
This is the Hidden Kernel Problem: To be useful, an agent needs access to a kernel. To be safe, that kernel must be completely isolated from your production network.
You don’t need a better code review process. You need a better sandbox.
Infrastructure as a Throwaway Resource
The solution isn’t to lock the agents out. It’s to give them a safe place to crash.
We need to treat execution environments the same way we treat Docker containers: ephemeral, disposable, and cheap.
Imagine a workflow where every agent task spins up its own micro-VM.
- The agent attempts a refactor.
- It runs the migration in the sandbox.
- It breaks the database.
- The sandbox evaporates.
No alerts. No rollback tickets. No panic. The failure was contained in a vacuum.
The Verification Layer
This is why we are building PrevHQ.
We aren’t just giving you a preview URL for your human PRs. We are building the Verification Layer for your AI workforce.
PrevHQ provides the ephemeral infrastructure that allows agents to “prove their work.” We give them a sandbox to break things in, so they don’t break the things that matter.
Don’t give your agents root access to your staging server. Give them a playground that disappears when they’re done.