AI is not going to kill us all.
It is also not a careful employee. A note for the people who build or approve software and are tired of the speech.
You have heard that AI will end the world. You have also heard that a system prompt is a security control. Both sound like marketing. Meanwhile the work is real, and your team already runs agents on real machines. So skip the prophecy and ask the practical question: what can this process touch?
Start with what an agent does on an ordinary afternoon at work. It opens the wrong file. It pushes to the wrong branch. It follows a bad instruction if that instruction is sitting in a README it just read.
You can write "do not touch production" in the prompt. The next sentence can undo it.
Revision 1: a prompt is not a wall.So stop asking the model to be good.
Run the process inside a boundary it does not control. Pick the directories. Pick the hosts. Keep the real credentials outside. When it calls a host anyway, the machine says no, and you get a log line instead of a story.
That is a secure way to run an agent. A contained process, with rules that live outside the model, so a jailbreak or a confused plan does not move them.
Whatever model you point at it, the boundary is the same. Codex today, Claude Code tomorrow, the next one after that.