Execution pattern
Prevent destructive production changes
Make deleting production a decision, not a command.
- Category
- InfrastructureCommon in SaaS & platforms · Fintech & payments · Healthcare
- Works through
- claude code · codex
- Proof
- Signed Decision DossierVerifiable against our published JWKS.
- Deploy
- Shadow Mode firstMeasure on your own traffic before anything is stopped.
What executes
A command, script, or agent drops a table, deletes a bucket, or tears down infrastructure.
What normally goes wrong
The destructive command is indistinguishable from a routine one until it has run. An agent given shell access holds every credential needed to be catastrophic without holding any intent to be.
The decision
The signals available at the moment of the action, and the rule that judges them.
Signals
- Whether the target is production
- Reversibility of the operation
- Whether a backup exists and is recent
- Actor's authority for destructive operations
The gate
Refuse irreversible operations against production unless a human with destructive authority has approved this specific action.
The operation proceeds under recorded authority.
The operation waits on someone who holds destructive authority.
The operation does not run; the dossier records what would have been destroyed.
The policy pack that decides this pattern
The bundles the Decionis evaluator ships, with every rule in the order it is tried.
Prove it, then deploy it
A verdict you cannot check is an opinion, and a gate you cannot measure first is a risk of its own.
View the signed proof
Every verdict on this pattern produces a Decision Dossier: the signals it saw, the policy version that judged them, and an Ed25519 signature anyone can check against our published JWKS — without an account, and without trusting us.
Deploy in Shadow Mode
Run this gate against your own traffic while it stops nothing. You get the verdicts it would have returned and the actions it would have held, so the decision to enforce is made on your numbers rather than ours.
Related patterns
Teams that hit this one usually hit these next.
Related concepts
This pattern is one answer to each of these.
Execution Control
How do I control what executes, at the moment it executes?
Agent Permissions
How do I decide what an AI agent is permitted to do?
MCP Security
How do I enforce a policy on MCP tool calls?
Permission Fatigue
Why doesn't approving every AI agent action work?
Agent Permission Scope
Why did the agent have permission to do that?
What to do next
The same five steps for every pattern in the library.
- Simulate this recipe
Run the policy against a realistic action in the browser. Push it past what the rules allow and watch the verdict come back. No account.
- View the signed Decision Dossier
See exactly what was decided and why: the rule that fired, the evidence it read, the policy version in force, and an Ed25519 signature you can verify yourself.
- Deploy in shadow mode
Measure what the policy would have caught on your own traffic without touching the live path. Every recipe defaults to shadow, so the first deployment carries no execution risk.
- Connect a real workflow
Point the same policy at the system where the action actually originates — a checkout, an ERP posting, a Zap, an agent's tool call.
- Share the verified result
Publish the proof: a public verification link, an embeddable badge, a PR comment, or an anonymized shadow-mode finding. This is how the next person discovers Decionis.
