In week one of an AI coding assistant rollout, put five controls in place: an approved tool list, least-privilege access, secret hygiene, required review on every merge, and basic logging. They cost little, and they cover the most common ways an assistant causes harm before you have tuned anything.
The five controls
| Control | Week one action | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Approved tools | Publish a short list of assistants and tool servers developers may use | Unknown tools are unknown risk |
| Least privilege | Read-only by default, no production credentials on developer machines | OWASP names excessive permissions as a root cause of agent harm |
| Secret hygiene | Add secret scanning before commit and block env files from agent reach | Assistants read whatever the project holds |
| Reviewed merges | Require human review and passing checks for assistant-written changes | The reviewer is the last independent check |
| Logging | Keep a record of tool calls where the tool supports it | Limits damage and speeds investigation |
Day by day
Day one. Decide who owns the rollout and write the approved list. Keep it to the tools you can actually support.
Day two. Check what each tool can reach. Look at file access, shell access and network access. OWASP advises avoiding open-ended extensions such as a shell or URL fetch in favour of granular ones, so note any that exist and decide whether to keep them.
Day three. Move secrets out of project files. Rotate any that were already exposed to an assistant session.
Day four. Turn on branch protection so assistant-written changes need review and passing checks. Add dependency checks, since assistants can suggest packages that do not exist or are poorly maintained.
Day five. Write down the exceptions process and the incident contact. Tell developers what to do if they paste something sensitive into a chat.
What to leave for later
Do not try to measure productivity, negotiate every vendor term, or write a long policy in week one. Those matter, but they slow the controls that reduce risk now. A short policy that people follow beats a long one that waits for legal review.
Revisit after thirty days using what the logs and reviewers tell you. The 30 day pilot plan covers that stage.
Try it yourself
Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.
Watch how a pull request gate stops a risky change before merge, which is the reviewed-merge control in action.
Safeguard provides pull request gates, SBOM and dependency scanning, and an MCP Guardrail, and you can run the free scan on a repository today.
Quick check
Should assistant-written code be labelled?
It helps reviewers and incident response, so many teams do it through commit trailers. Decide the convention early and keep it consistent.
Is one human reviewer enough?
For most changes, yes, if the reviewer actually reads the diff. For high-risk areas such as authentication or payment code, require a second reviewer from the owning team.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
