# Jeffrey Aven — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/jeffrey-aven/
Program status: The speaker lineup and talk descriptions are public. Session days, times, rooms and the full timetable have not yet been published.

## Query before mutation: guardrail patterns for agents that touch production infrastructure


Covered in the session:

- Why plan-and-apply was always a human safety mechanism: a person reads the plan, notices something is off, and stops the apply - and why this quietly disappears the moment an agent is the operator
- Query before mutation as the foundational pattern: requiring agents to establish current state from the live environment before any write, and why reasoning from stale context is the root cause of most agent-inflicted damage
- Idempotent assertions over imperative commands: expressing changes as desired state the agent can safely retry, rather than one-shot operations that compound when repeated
- Policy gates that work without a human: encoding the judgement a reviewer would have applied as machine-checkable rules at the interface, not in a document
- Blast radius controls: scoping agent credentials and mutation surfaces so the worst case is bounded, including read-only by default with explicit mutation grants
- What went wrong on the way here: real examples of agent behaviour against live cloud environments that motivated each pattern, including failures the patterns would not have caught
- A demo of an agent operating against real infrastructure with these guardrails active, including a blocked mutation and the recovery path

Attendees will leave with a practical guardrail checklist for any agent that can modify infrastructure, ordered by which controls give the most protection for the least effort.

## Jeffrey Aven

Maintainer, StackQL Studios

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyaven/

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)