Blast Radius Containment

Blast radius containment is the practice of designing agent systems so that any single failure, error, or security compromise affects the smallest possible scope — preventing a problem in one agent or tool from cascading into a system-wide incident. Key containment strategies include filesystem scoping (restricting agents to specific directories), network isolation (limiting which endpoints agents can reach), transaction boundaries (making destructive operations reversible), and resource limits (capping tokens, time, and compute per task). The concept comes from infrastructure engineering where blast radius is the standard way to think about failure domains, and it applies directly to agentic systems because agents are unpredictable by nature — you can't prevent all failures, but you can contain them. Understanding blast radius is essential because the most dangerous agent failures aren't the ones that crash (those are obvious), but the ones that silently corrupt data, exfiltrate information, or make unintended changes that only surface hours or days later. This concept connects to least privilege for the permission layer that limits blast radius, ephemeral sandboxing for the strongest containment through disposable environments, error recovery for what happens within a contained failure domain, and permission models for the authorization framework that enforces boundaries.