A guardrail is a deterministic check outside the model that constrains what a run may do: an allowlist, a spend ceiling, a confirmation gate, an output filter. Its value comes precisely from not being a model, because it cannot be argued with.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

A topic of the Building AI Agents course. Planned for 1.5 hours at Medium difficulty.

Guardrails, Cost Control and Human-in-the-Loop

Guardrail

Insert a human before irreversible or expensive actions, not after every step. Approval fatigue is real: an agent that asks twenty times per run gets rubber-stamped, which is worse than an agent that asks once at the point that matters.

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