Safe defaults for an agent that can act
Warden defaults to asking before an agent takes an ambiguous action, gates autonomous work behind workspace trust, and lets the operator pre-approve routine actions with explicit rules.
The risk with a capable coding agent is not the work it does on request. It is the action it takes when no one has said yes yet. A command that deletes, a file that gets overwritten, a network call in a repository you were only meant to read: any of these can happen in the gap between a proposal and a human decision. The safe posture is for that gap to default to a stop.
Fail closed, then let the operator open the door
Warden’s native desktop cockpit is built so the cautious answer is the default one. When a proposed action is ambiguous or carries risk, Warden’s permission engine stops and asks rather than assuming approval. Nothing about that is meant to slow the operator down for its own sake. It is meant to keep the consequential moment in human hands, where a mistaken yes is expensive and a deliberate yes is cheap.
Trust is scoped to the workspace, not granted everywhere at once. An operator decides that a given project is trusted before autonomous action runs there, so opening an unfamiliar repository does not hand an agent the keys by accident.
Rules so you are only asked what matters
A default that asks about everything would train an operator to click through prompts without reading them. Warden lets the operator pre-approve the routine, repetitive actions with explicit rules, so attention is saved for the requests that actually deserve a second look. Approve a request once, or write a rule so the same safe action is not raised again, and the noisy part of supervision quiets down without loosening the posture on the parts that count.
That control belongs next to the work. Warden keeps permission decisions alongside session state, plan progress, and file and command activity, and code understanding from TheAuditor and curated context from Curator can sit in the same view, so an approval can be judged against what the code actually does rather than on trust alone.
Warden is a working proprietary development build. The public binary is targeted for roughly two to three months, with supported permission modes, approval rules, and workspace trust stated for that release.
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