Your AI agent can read your inbox, plan your trip, and act through your browser. But when it uses your login, how much access should it really have? In this episode of Debug Mode, we unpack agent identity, permissions, and the challenge of giving AI more responsibility without handing it the keys to everything. Through a fictional finance agent named Ryan, we explore prompt injection, why an agent’s intent matters, and what fraud detection could teach us about safer AI systems. Then we get practical: daily briefings across email and messaging apps, using chat as a control center, planning a trip to Japan, and tackling German paperwork. Along the way, we ask where convenience becomes risk—and when a human should still make the final call.

What does it take to build AI agents that deliver useful, reliable work? Stanford lecturer and Monaco Head of AI Mihail Eric joins Demetrios for a conversation inside a Waymo about how AI is changing software development - and what it takes to put agents into production. Mihail explains why he rebuilt most of his Modern Software Developer course, how he teaches students to avoid shipping AI slop, and why research, planning, and verification still matter as coding agents become more capable.

Humans used to give infrastructure a breather. AI agents don’t. In this episode of Debug Mode, Erika and Demetrios explore what happens when one person’s prompt triggers a burst of searches, API calls, and compute-intensive requests - and why existing services, gateways, and pricing models can struggle to keep up.