On AI coding harnesses

As a developer I can’t deny we’re in a revolution.
I find AI so crazy and powerful, but also a trickster and a double agent.

Therefore I use it strictly as a pair programmer and only give it write access to planning docs.
It can propose code, but only I write to code files.

But there’s also a growing world of personal software that this approach may be missing.

I’m working on an environment to let AI cook unattended:
Matchlock sandbox with Pi coding agent running inside.

Matchlock runs work inside a locked-down VM, with explicit controls over filesystem and network access.
Pi is the coding harness. While Claude Code, Codex etc change their rules all the time, Pi holds onto, and builds on, my preferences with an ultra-minimal tooling philosophy (Bash over MCP).
I’m sketching a boot sequence here: https://github.com/alvarix/sandboxer.
Feedback welcome.