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The Cycles Blog ​

Engineering insights, product updates, and best practices for AI agent runtime authority, exposure, and cost control.

Tools you can run on your own numbers: Cost Calculator (Claude vs GPT) → · Blast Radius Risk Calculator → — every configuration produces a shareable URL. Many of the posts below link to a calculator pre-loaded with the post's specific scenario.

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The Model Call Succeeded. Then the Process Died.FEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

How Cycles preserves known AI agent spend across lost responses, expired reservations, credential failures, and process restarts.

Cursor Agent Deleted a Prod Database in 9 SecondsFEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 9 min read

Cursor agent reportedly wiped a Railway production database and backups in one API call. Prompts aren't permissions — agents need pre-execution gates.

Agents Are Cross-Cutting. Your Controls Aren't.FEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 9 min read

Agents span providers, tools, tenants, and workers. Learn why governance needs cross-cutting budget authority plus application-side authorization at runtime.

State of AI Agent Governance 2026FEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 14 min read

AI agents moved to production faster than governance kept up. This is the state of enforcement, regulation, and incidents in 2026 — and what comes next.

AI Agent Risk Assessment: Score, Classify, EnforceFEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 17 min read

Classify AI agent actions by blast radius, assign consistent risk scores, and translate each assessment into enforceable runtime budget controls in practice.

Durable Budget Control for LangChain Agents

· Albert Mavashev · 6 min read

Build a LangChain agent that gates model and tool calls before execution, captures actual usage, and preserves settlement after failures.

The Model Call Succeeded. Then the Process Died.FEATURED

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

How Cycles preserves known AI agent spend across lost responses, expired reservations, credential failures, and process restarts.

NIST Agent Overlays Need Task-Scoped Permissions

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

NIST's COSAiS is drafting SP 800-53 overlays for AI agents. CSA identifies task-scoped permissions among several gaps operators should address in 2026.

Safe Lease Heartbeats for AI Agents

· Albert Mavashev · 9 min read

Why safe agent lease heartbeats require server-authoritative remaining TTL, monotonic timing, bounded retry windows, and fresh idempotent replay responses.

Proving a Critical-Path Agent Safety Gate

· Albert Mavashev · 8 min read

How Cycles tested a critical-path agent gate for latency, saturation, fail-closed behavior, ledger correctness, and durable recovery across four SDKs.

MCP 2026-07-28: What Agent Operators Must Change

· Albert Mavashev · 7 min read

The MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate removes sessions and adds routing headers. What operators should prepare before the final specification is published.

Prove You Had Controls: Agent Liability in 2026

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

The CMA says you're liable for what your agents do. Contracts exclude the damages. Insurers ask for oversight evidence. Signed decision records serve all three.

Announcing Cycles Budget Guard for Claude Code

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

Cycles Budget Guard for Claude Code adds dispatch-path enforcement, blocks denied gated tools before they run, and safely retries recorded-call settlement.

OWASP Agentic Top 10: What Can Be Enforced?

· Albert Mavashev · 6 min read

OWASP's June 2026 data says prompt injection touches six of ten agentic risks. Which ASI categories a pre-execution authority layer can actually enforce.

Lethal Trifecta, Rule of Two, and Metered Authority

· Albert Mavashev · 5 min read

Willison's lethal trifecta and Meta's Rule of Two both subtract agent capabilities. A third option: keep all three legs and meter the most dangerous one.