How to Let AI Agents Deploy Code Without Granting Dangerous Server Access

AI coding agents like Cursor and Claude can now handle deployments, but giving them broad server access via SSH keys or admin tokens creates serious security risks. A safer approach uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which exposes only specific deployment operations — such as deploy, rollback, and log retrieval — as typed tools the agent can call. Authorization is enforced server-side on every request, and all actions are logged through the same audit trail used by human operators. The pattern recommends per-workspace tokens, role inheritance from the issuing user, no shell access for agents, and treating tokens like passwords stored in secret managers. Open-source self-hostable platform Peon is cited as a reference implementation, with its MCP endpoint built directly into the application rather than added as a separate script.