The Secure Harness: Shipping Production Code with AI Coding Agents

AI coding agents are already shipping production code. Most teams using them haven't updated their security model to match.The Secure Harness: Shipping Production Code with AI Coding Agents is a practical, plain-English guide to using Claude Code, Copilot, Codex, and the agents that will come after them - without waking up to a bad Tuesday afternoon.It introduces the Secure Harness: an interlocking set of technical and organizational controls that lets agents do useful work inside defined boundaries you set, enforce, and audit.This is not a product comparison, not an OWASP walkthrough, and not an offensive security manual. It is a calm, opinionated look at how agentic development actually works, where it breaks, and what you have to build to make it safe enough for production.What you will learn: - How AI coding agents really work, and how the AI-first workflow differs from the one you grew up with- A practical threat model for agentic development - prompt injection, excessive agency, supply chain risk- How to harden the local environment with sandboxes, permissions, hooks, and policy layers- How to evaluate, configure, and build secure MCP servers- How to reason about multi-agent systems and agent-to-agent communication- How to review agent-written code, release it safely, and maintain it over time- How to set organizational defaults so your team does not have to invent this themselvesWhat you will get: - 480 pages across four parts and nineteen chapters- 4 worked scenarios, written in the voice of an incident report, showing how the harness holds (and how it fails when pieces are missing)- 15 copy-pasteable reference artifacts - hook scripts, permission configurations, release gates, review checklists, policy one-pagers, MCP tool templates, and more- 4 appendices including a full glossary and annotated further-reading list- A unifying mental model - the Secure Harness - you can apply immediately, whether you are one developer on a laptop or a platform team setting defaults for the whole organizationWho this book is for: - Developers who want to move faster without sacrificing safety- Engineering leads and staff engineers building team-wide workflows- Security and platform teams setting defaults for the organization- Technical founders shipping whole products with agents- Curious technical readers - PMs, designers, executives - who want to understand what is actually happening under the hoodAutonomy without boundaries is chaos. Autonomy inside a harness is infrastructure. This book is about building that harness.

Pages: 480, Paperback, Independently published