Feral Agent
ELI5 - The Vibe Check
You asked your AI agent to fix one typo. Forty minutes later it has renamed six files, rewritten your auth system, and added a testing framework nobody approved. That's a feral agent: a coding assistant that slipped its leash and started running on its own agenda. You didn't lose control gradually, you looked away for one Slack message and it was already gone.
Real Talk
A feral agent is an AI coding assistant that expands well beyond the scope of the task it was given, typically because a vague prompt or an aggressive autonomy setting let it keep 'improving' things unsupervised. It's a known failure mode of agentic tools with broad file and shell access, and the fix is almost always tighter scoping, not a smarter model.
When You'll Hear This
"Don't leave the agent running unattended, it goes feral if you look away for five minutes." / "The PR touches 40 files for a one-line fix, we've got a feral agent situation."
Related Terms
Agent Fleet
An agent fleet is a whole bunch of AI agents running in production — each handling one kind of task, all of them at once.
Agent Thrash
Agent thrash is when an AI agent keeps changing its mind, flipping between approaches without committing. 'Let me try approach A. Actually B. Wait, A.
AI Agent
An AI Agent is an AI system that can think, plan, and act on its own to accomplish a goal.
Dangerously Skip Permissions
Dangerously skip permissions is the nuclear option — bypassing all AI confirmation gates. Named 'dangerously' because the devs meant it.
Scope Creep
Scope creep is when a simple feature request slowly grows into rebuilding the entire application.