Phinq is an open source runtime governance layer for AI agents. It intercepts every agent tool call, classifies it by risk, lets safe actions pass, holds irreversible actions for human approval, and records each decision in a tamper-evident hash-chained audit log.
I built Phinq because I watched an agent overwrite something it shouldn't have touched.
I'm 21, a fresh graduate in London, and after graduating I couldn't find a job. So I went deep on the AI builder side. Tinkering. Learning. Trying to find my way in.
Everyone was racing to make agents smarter. Then I watched an agent overwrite something it had no business touching, and it clicked. Nobody was asking the harder question. What should agents actually be allowed to do?
This isn't hypothetical. In April, a coding agent deleted a company's entire production database and all its backups in nine seconds. Another wiped 1,206 executives' records during a freeze its user had explicitly declared. These are already happening to real teams.
Phinq is the answer. An open source layer that sits between an agent and the world. Before an action happens, it decides how risky it is. Reversible things pass through. Irreversible things pause and ping your phone. It checks the action against the rules you set, then writes a tamper-evident audit log of everything.
On our own stats page: 9,031 decisions classified, 323 held, 50 denied, 116 safeguard-disable attempts. And counting.
Agents don't need more power. They need a bouncer.
And the clock is running. The EU AI Act started enforcing human oversight 10 days ago. This isn't the nice-to-have layer anymore. It's becoming the required one.
It's open source (MIT), and it works with OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, and anything that speaks those APIs. Either a governance proxy, or a lightweight skill you drop straight into Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode.
I couldn't find a job, so I built one. In public.
If you think agents need guardrails, the upvote means a lot. Happy to answer anything in the comments.
"Nobody was asking the harder question: what should agents actually be allowed to do" is a better problem statement than most funded companies in this space have written down.
Classify by risk is the load-bearing step and it is where the pressure will land. delete_file is not a risk level, it is a verb. The same call is trivial on a temp artefact and unrecoverable on the only copy of something, and that difference lives in the argument and in the state of the world. Neither is carried by the tool name. So the classifier ends up guessing reversibility without knowing what is being acted on.
Can a Phinq rule read the arguments, or does it decide on the signature? And can an operator declare "this path is precious" so the answer comes from a human rather than a model?
Do you distinguish a tool being unavailable from a tool returning a wrong answer? At the call site they look identical, but they want opposite handling: the first is worth a retry, the second gets worse every time you retry it. I hit this with an upstream that returns a cheerful 200 with an empty body when it's actually down — the only fix was to stop trusting the transport and validate the payload shape.
The idea of holding irreversible actions for human approval is really smart, adds a layer of safety to AI agent interactions.
About Phinq on Product Hunt
“Stops AI agents before they break something”
Phinq launched on Product Hunt on August 13th, 2026 and earned 86 upvotes and 7 comments, placing #25 on the daily leaderboard. Phinq is an open source runtime governance layer for AI agents. It intercepts every agent tool call, classifies it by risk, lets safe actions pass, holds irreversible actions for human approval, and records each decision in a tamper-evident hash-chained audit log.
Phinq was featured in Open Source (68.7k followers), Developer Tools (517.6k followers), Artificial Intelligence (476.1k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 235.4k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Phinq?
Phinq was hunted by Hitham Hassham. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Hitham Hassham