Keeping the Agents
An audit, a tourniquet, and a machine with real walls
I read every AI skill installed on my Mac: 140 of them, 10,904 files, every one hashed. I fixed what I could in a weekend. Then I built Nagi, a separate machine where the risky half of my AI tooling runs inside walls I can test.
Five videos and a recap, each one standalone. Watch them in any order. Every number in them comes from a record written at the time, including the mistakes.
1 of 6 out · next: The Tourniquet, · talking head, read from a teleprompter · the 33-second version
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The Audit
What did I find when I read every AI skill on my Mac?
140 skills, 10,904 files, every one hashed, and 7,530 scanner findings given a verdict each. No malware. Ten design decisions which stacked into a real attack surface, and the biggest one was mine.
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The Tourniquet
What did I change that weekend, and what didn't I fix?
Nine fixes: silent updates gone, a CLI pinned across 215 files, an unsigned binary deleted, a macOS sandbox. Then the 128 findings still unresolved, named, and seven things to do, cheapest first.
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The Plan
Why a separate machine, and what did I measure first?
The plan as written before the build: three measurements on live hardware, the assumption I had backwards, a virtual machine instead of a container, and five questions I had no answer to.
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The Build
How is Nagi built, and what did testing catch?
Firmware channels switched off, a Debian host, a virtual machine with Claude inside, three capped keys and nothing else. Testing caught two mistakes in my firewall plan, one of them a fix which passed for the wrong reason.
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What It's For
What does Nagi do, and what does my Mac no longer have to?
Twenty videos built with the permission prompts off, for about $30 of Claude usage. What broke in real use, the SEO crawl before and after, and what my Mac no longer runs.
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The Recap
Where does every open item from the series stand now?
Ten ranked risks: eight removed or closed, one fixed, one reported to the vendor. All 128 findings left unresolved in The Tourniquet are now closed, by removing the skills rather than by a vendor fix.