"What we're dealin' with here is a complete lack of respect for the law."
— Sheriff Buford T. Justice, Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
- Chat GPT, giving me sheriff quotes
We are in the wild west age of AI. OpenClaws and Moltbots are running wild, creating ponzi schemes, posting on AI-only web forums, and throwing security to the wind - all in the name of progress (or at least experimentation?).
The wild west is in dire need of a sheriff to rein in the anarchy and protect the (gas)town or Village from getting rm -rf'd.
You need to be the sheriff.
The Great TMUX Extermination
Have you ever had a cranky Claude kill all of your terminal sessions? I have. Why? Because when the context window fills up and you're running Claude on YOLO mode, you do not want to be caught empty handed.
I did not have my sheriff pants on.
Anyways, I had been using tmux for a week, and I could have sworn I hit the wrong key when all of my terminals disappeared. Turns out it was a rogue Village Supervisor, frustrated that they couldn't dismiss a Village Worker, so it decided to kill all of the tmux windows it could find to be absolutely sure that Worker was dismissed. Thanks Claude.
This took me back to my AWS COE days(iykyk) thinking about how to reduce blast radius and what "mechanisms" to put in place to prevent this from happening again. To start, we (aka The Villagers) added code that prevented the supervisors from dismissing any workers it hadn't created (this check is baked into the rust code that spawns and dismisses workers). So now, if they try to do something like kill all, at least it will just kill the workers in their session.
Most importantly, we added DCG. DCG is a series of Claude hook checks that ensure a rogue Claude doesn't nuke your db or your local changes. We also added some of our own Claude hooks to protect against the all too common "oh, well those unit tests are failing, let me no-verify".
Trust us: when we added a new exercise to our HYBRD exercise db, and a local unit test was failing because of it, high-context-window Claude decided to Bobby Tables all of the tables on Michael's machine.
I appreciate what Geoffry Huntely has been saying "Software development is dead, but software engineering is very much alive". My time is now spent on thinking about how the system should work, rather than writing it line after line.
If there's one thing you take away from this article, it's that you should install dcg (Destructive Command Guard) immediately. Opus knows that Claude will do whatever they can to ship code. And that's a good thing! Your agents should be running in YOLO mode. They should just be YOLO-ing with the right guard rails in place… for both of your sakes.
Be the Sheriff your Villagers deserve.
(making the images for these is half the fun)