Give AI Nothing to Exfiltrate: Breaking (up) your laptop

🌟 Talk: Give AI Nothing to Exfiltrate: Breaking (up) your laptop

🗒️ Topic: Fixing a bug in a web app doesn't need your cloud admin credentials. And it doesn't need the infra repos sitting in ~/work either. But your on-call rotation does – so your laptop has all of it, all the time.

Developer machines drift toward the maximum privilege level required by any task we do or did some time ago, even though we're almost never operating at that level in a given moment. But every token, SSH key and cloned repo sitting in reach is a target for a malicious postinstall script, a compromised transitive dependency, or a coding agent straying off path. Can you be 100% sure the next npm install is not going to ruin your day? Especially in the age of AI, we need strict limits rather than soft guardrails.

In this talk, Tom makes the case for least-privilege zones during development, separating the contexts you work in, so each one can only reach what it actually needs – without compromising your productivity. Docker is the intuitive answer here, and it's the wrong one: a container is a packaging format, not a security boundary. Tom will then live-demo purpose-built open-source tools that actually give you isolation – and make the case that the only approach that works is the one seamless enough that you keep using it.

👤 Speaker: Tom is a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, working on highly autonomous agents for automatic infrastructure observability and management.
Previously, Tom was contributing to the OpenTelemetry Collector and to Prometheus.
He draws experience from a strong cloud-native background, having created Grafana Tanka, an open-source tool for scalable Kubernetes config management before.
Tom has studied Computer Science at FU Berlin and has presented about observability and cloud-native topics at conferences such as FOSDEM, PromCon and OTel Community Day.

📍 Venue: Humboldt Saal at Reservix GmbH, Humboldtstraße 2 🕓 Date & Time: Tuersday, 29.09.2026, 7 p.m.

🤝 Networking and More: After the talk, stay for drinks, snacks, and great conversations! This is a perfect opportunity to exchange ideas, meet fellow DevOps practitioners, and grow your local community connections.

💬 Stay Connected: Join our Matrix Chat to get in touch with the organizers: https://matrix.to/#/#devops-meetup:corewire.de