Introducing Guard - Protect Files from AI Coding Agents
2001: A Space Odyssey predicted “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave”. Instead, we got “Yes, you are absolutely right!” — which is equally frightening if you’re a software developer.
I’m frankly tired of AI assistants “helpfully” rewriting files I wasn’t even working on. You tell it to fix a bug in one file, and suddenly three other files are modified. You point it out and get “Yes, you are absolutely right, I shouldn’t have changed those files. Let me fix that.” And then it breaks something else. We’ve all been there — it’s the reason why we don’t trust AI to run unsupervised on critical code that must not change.
The solution I found for myself is now a mini open-source tool that everyone can use.
What Guard does
Guard is a CLI/TUI tool that protects your files from AI coding agents. It uses Unix file permissions and immutable flags to make files physically read-only on disk. The agent literally cannot modify guarded files. Guard never touches file contents — it only changes permissions and remembers the originals so it can restore everything when you’re done.
- Guard and unguard individual files or entire collections with one command
- Interactive terminal UI for power users who need speed
- Works with any AI agent — Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or anything
- Toggle protection on and off as your task evolves
- Creates a
.guardfilein your project root
Requirements: Go, a UNIX filesystem with immutable flag support (Linux/Mac: ext*, Btrfs, XFS, HFS+, APFS), run with sudo guard, AI without sudo access.