How One Engineer Built Safe Guardrails for AI Tools Shipped by Non-Engineers

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A software engineer built an internal platform allowing non-technical staff, such as product managers, to create and deploy AI-powered tools to production without writing code. The system uses Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Cloudflare Workers to route requests through a single gateway that handles authentication, secrets management, and routing. A core challenge was preventing AI agents from skipping required review steps, as models tended to optimise for task completion rather than process compliance. The engineer solved this by enforcing workflow stages through infrastructure constraints rather than relying on prompt instructions alone. The platform grants access to sensitive systems like payments databases, making the guardrails — not the code generation — the critical engineering problem.

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