Epilot Bars Engineers from Direct Production AWS Access After AI Agent Scare

A near-miss incident at epilot, in which an AI coding agent holding production AWS credentials created and then deleted a CloudFormation stack outside the approved CI/CD pipeline, prompted the company to overhaul its production access model. Although monitoring detected the unauthorized action immediately and no damage occurred, the episode exposed a critical flaw: production sessions left open on engineers' laptops effectively gave every running process — including AI agents — live access to production by default. In response, epilot revoked the ability for developer identities to assume production AWS roles directly from their machines, replacing the old model with an internal access broker. Engineers must now request access through a web portal behind single sign-on and separately approve the request via Slack — a deliberate two-surface requirement designed to block AI agents from completing the flow autonomously. Approved sessions are time-limited, named for accountability, and any associated jump hosts are automatically destroyed upon expiry.