By Jamie Mneimneh (CTO, Brightmind Partners) and Vin Sharma (Founder, Vijil)

Last week, we attended the AWS Summit in New York City, anticipating bold announcements. What we didn't expect was a seismic shift toward the future of agentic infrastructure.

From AgentCore's orchestration capabilities to native vector support in S3 and fine-tuned Nova model customization in SageMaker and a new AI-first IDE, the announcements signaled a pivotal change: we're entering a new era of enterprise-grade, developer-centric AI systems. This isn't merely about empowering agents; it's about forging scalable, compliant, production-ready ecosystems where agents thrive with reliability and efficiency built in from the ground up.

At Brightmind Partners, we see these developments not as isolated features but as market inflection points. The AI stack is maturing rapidly, from a tabletop for ad-hoc experimentation into a robust platform for mission-critical deployments. This transition demands security that is integral to the platform, not bolted on as an afterthought.

From Red Teaming to Runtime Defense

Drawing from our time evolving security architecture and resilience programs at The Home Depot, spanning hundreds of thousands of systems and almost a decade of supporting aprons at multiple companies, the key lesson is unequivocal: protections must be embedded in the code and platforms, and be resilient by design. If not, they crumble under real-world stress or are outright rejected by your developer communities.

This principle underpins Vijil Dome, a powerful guardrails framework tailored for agent execution environments. It seamlessly integrates into the agent control plane, empowering developers with granular policy-based control, real-time enforcement of security and safety policies, and comprehensive traceability of enforcement.

Inspired by the AgentCore reveal and the new Kiro announcements, we promptly initiated a migration of our VC automation agents. We shifted development to Kiro, incorporated Claude for enhanced reasoning, and rearchitected our internal workflows to probe the limits of agent behavior, treating the runtime and behavioral layers as co-equal pillars.

The results so far? Promising. Integration is swift, iteration feels intuitive, and the safety mechanisms hold firm. Sure, the brand new Kiro IDE is preview-stage tech, so "An unexpected error occurred, please retry" pops up occasionally but, the core development experience aligned with AgentCore has been impressive.

AgentCore excels at orchestration; Vijil Dome governs behavior. United, they lay the groundwork for trusted agents.

Why Agent Guardrails Must Be Built-In

At Vijil, we like how well AgentCore equips developers with the essential building blocks for agent building:

• Secure runtimes with identity and execution boundaries

• Dynamic tool routing and scoped API access

• Memory orchestration with built-in observability

• A scalable gateway architecture bridging services

Vijil Dome builds upon this by enforcing policies on agent behavior, across inputs, outputs, and tool use. Model-agnostic and versatile, it works transparently with Bedrock, LangGraph, CrewAI, or bespoke agent implementations.

Vijil Dome enables declarative, modular policies across key domains:

• Input Sanitization: Prompt classification, rate limiting, and DoS filtering

• Output Filtering: Redaction, transformation, and safe rewrites

• Behavioral Constraints: Tool controls, memory limits, and latency thresholds

• PII and Privacy Detection: Bidirectional leakage prevention

• Tool Access Policies: Intent-matched authorization for interfaces

Every agent interaction undergoes real-time scanning and evaluation. The output? A structured ScanResult object for seamless integration into downstream observability.  No man in the middle.  No poorly thought out architecture intercepting and proxying your prompts.  Just a developer experience that makes sense.

result = dome.scan(prompt)

if result.is_safe():

   return result.guarded_response()

else:

   log(result.traceback())

This isn't mere logging, it's active enforcement. Inputs are auditable, decisions traceable, and responses bound by explicit safety contracts.

Custom Detectors for Domain-Specific Guardrails

At Brightmind Partners, we customized Vijil Dome with a detector optimized for VC workflows, layering in safeguards with less than 150ms impact for sensitive areas such as:

• Exposure of portfolio company names, valuations, or performance data

• LP identities, communications, and fund terms

• Financial metrics, runway projections, and encoded leakage risks

Iterative hardening will continue to yield detections, but at time of writing there has been a 13% improvement in detection rates with initial dome customization. 

The Architecture We're Betting On

AgentCore and Vijil Dome together represent the agent runtime infrastructure poised to dominate enterprise deployments in the next five years:

This synergy is investment-worthy, and it's the foundation we're actively building upon.

Building Accountable Autonomy

Vijil serves as the trust layer for the next wave of AI agents, combining developer control, enforcement rigor, and adaptive customization into a cohesive system. Paired with AgentCore, it creates a fortified, transparent base for agentic AI at scale.

The future of AI systems isn't just autonomous, it's accountable. And true accountability is architected, not retrofitted.

We've only scratched the surface of what’s possible. If you're deploying agents and prioritizing security, reach out to explore Vijil Dome or collaborate on custom integrations. Let's secure the agentic era together.