Self-healing builds, 59 skills, and runtime safety: what it took to build PocketTeam

How I made AI-assisted coding safe: hook-based runtime interception instead of prompt instructions Ask most AI coding tools how they prevent dangerous operations and they'll say something like: "The model is instructed not to do X." That's not a safety system. That's a gentleman's agreement. I built PocketTeam partly to solve a real workflow problem (solo devs skipping pipeline steps), but the most interesting engineering challenge was this: how do you make an agentic system safe in a way that actually holds up? The problem with prompt-based safety Prompt instructions fail in at least three ways: Context compaction. When an agent's context window fills, older content gets summarized or dropped. Your safety instructions might not survive. Prompt injection. A malicious or malformed input can override instructions if they're just text in the conversation. Emergent behavior. Even well-instructed models sometimes do unexpected things. "Please don't" is probabilistic guidance, not a hard con