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12-Year-Old Developer's Security Tool Blocks Its Own Creator for Two Days

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A 12-year-old developer built KAVLR, a security tool meant to act as a leash for AI agents, and tested it on a $150 Android phone using Termux. Its fail-closed design blocked commands whenever the backend server was unreachable, and attempts to host the backend on Vercel and Railway failed before Supabase Edge Functions worked. The tool then locked the developer out of their own terminal and files, creating what they called a zombie process that resisted deletion and corrupted their code. After tracing the problem with grep and rebuilding the affected files and symlinks, the developer restored normal function, and the hook correctly blocked a test command for a .env file. The developer shared the account as a lesson in persistence for others facing similar debugging battles.

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