Boundary drift

Detect when your agent uses undeclared tools or touches unknown resources in production.

You declared what your agent should do. Now you want to know when production behavior diverges — a new MCP tool appears, an agent starts calling deploy.release without a declaration, or a resource type you’ve never seen shows up in telemetry.

Apie compares runtime tool calls against your declared capabilities and surfaces drift warnings.

Enable drift warnings

Configure boundary warnings in your SDK config:

TypeScript

const apie = new Apie({
  agent: { key: "my-agent", name: "My Agent" },
  boundary: {
    warnOnUndeclaredTools: true,
    warnOnUnknownResourceTypes: true,
    autoInferFromToolNames: true,
  },
});

Setting	What it detects
warnOnUndeclaredTools	Tool calls for tools not in your declared capabilities
warnOnUnknownResourceTypes	Resource types not seen in any capability declaration
autoInferFromToolNames	Infer action/resource from tool names (helps match undeclared tools to expected patterns)

What drift looks like

Undeclared tool

Your agent calls vault.read_secret but you only declared search and github.merge_pr:

• Apie emits the tool call event normally
• A boundary warning is attached: tool vault.read_secret is not in declared capabilities
• In the dashboard, the boundary map highlights the gap

Unknown resource type

Your agent touches shell_command but your capabilities only list code_repository and work_item:

• A warning flags the unknown resource type
• Guardrails may treat it as higher risk if templates match on resource type

What you’ll see

Boundary drift warnings in the dashboard boundary map and in event validation output from doctor.

Remediation workflow

1. Monitor — run in monitor mode with drift warnings enabled
2. Review — check which undeclared tools appear in production telemetry
3. Declare — add missing capabilities via config or capabilities declare
4. Enforce — enable guardrail templates and switch to Enforce mode

TypeScript

npx apie capabilities declare
npx apie guardrails enable prod-secrets

MCP auto-discovery

The MCP proxy defines tools automatically when it receives tools/list from the upstream server. This reduces drift for MCP-hosted agents — but review auto-discovered tools before enabling Enforce mode.

See MCP proxy.

Next steps

Declare capabilities

Add missing tool declarations.

Boundary reports

Generate compliance reports over a time window.