This is exactly the right mental model. "Language is soft, infrastructure is hard" is the core insight most teams miss until they've been burned. The Unix escalation analogy is spot on.
We've been building in this space and the pattern we keep seeing is teams implement exactly what you described, then hit a wall when they have 3+ agents, or a new engineer joins, or they want to audit what happened across 10,000 agent runs last week.
What we built is essentially the infrastructure layer you're describing, but as a centralized control plane. Same primitives (structural constraints, escalation rules, audit-first for irreversibles), but portable across agents and visible to the whole team.
Curious — are you managing these identity files manually per agent, or do you have a system for it?
We've been building in this space and the pattern we keep seeing is teams implement exactly what you described, then hit a wall when they have 3+ agents, or a new engineer joins, or they want to audit what happened across 10,000 agent runs last week.
What we built is essentially the infrastructure layer you're describing, but as a centralized control plane. Same primitives (structural constraints, escalation rules, audit-first for irreversibles), but portable across agents and visible to the whole team.
Curious — are you managing these identity files manually per agent, or do you have a system for it?