sandspy

Zero-Friction Security Telemetry for Autonomous AI Agents

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The Problem

Autonomous AI coding agents like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and Aider accelerate are being used exponentially, by almost everyone. However, these tools require local shell execution and extensive filesystem access to function optimally, and new engineers and vibe coders are often oblivious to the issues that can happen if these agents are left unchecked.

This introduces an enormous blind spot. When an agent is navigating your machine at 1,000 WPM, it becomes nearly impossible to verify structurally safe behavior:

• What .env config files or SSH keys did it read?
• Did it accidentally copy your Stripe tokens into the systemic clipboard?
• Did a community script or CLI tool ping an unknown external telemetry server?
• Did it fall for a prompt injection attack and dumped your .env file on some remote unknown server?

sandspy visualizes the invisible. It is a lightweight, background sensor designed specifically to audit AI coding agents in real-time, giving you total peace of mind without slowing down your development.

✨ Features

• 🎯 Auto-Attach: Instantly discovers and hooks into active Agent PIDs (Cursor, Windsurf, Aider, etc.) with zero configuration required.
• 📡 Deep Network Forensics: Intercepts and categorizes every background TCP/UDP connection the agent initiates.
• 🔐 Regex Secret Sniffing: Memory-safe memory scanning. Instantly triggers CRITICAL risk alerts if the agent touches an AWS key, Stripe live token, or OpenAI secret.
• 📝 Clipboard Monitoring: Detects when malicious shell commands or agent responses poison your systemic clipboard.
• 🛡️ Self-Healing Daemon: If the AI process exits, the sandspy daemon silently resets and waits in an infinite loop to seamlessly re-attach to the next spawned process.
• 📊 Beautiful HTML Audits: Generates stunning, minimalist HTML executive summaries for your team to review post-session telemetry.

🤖 Supported Agents & Editors

sandspy operates seamlessly with any local process, but it is heavily optimized out-of-the-box to detect, hook, and filter noise specifically for the most powerful AI tools:

• Cursor
• Windsurf
• Aider
• Claude Code
• Roo Code / Cline

Don't see your favorite agent? It takes literally 2 minutes to define a new agent profile in a TOML file. Check out the guide!

🚀 Quick Start

Installation

sandspy is a lightweight Rust binary. Install it globally via Cargo:

cargo install sandspy

(Requires Rust 1.82+)

Or build from source:

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/sagarrroy/sandspy.git
cd sandspy

# 2. Build and install globally
cargo install --path . --force

# 3. Verify it works
sandspy --version

You'll need the Rust toolchain installed. Running cargo install --path . compiles an optimized release binary and places it in your $PATH automatically.

Commands

Command	Description
sandspy watch	Auto-detect and monitor the nearest running AI agent
sandspy attach <PID>	Manually attach to a specific running process by PID
sandspy demo	Run a simulated sandspy session (great for exploring the UI)
sandspy report	View, generate, or export a report for a recorded session
sandspy history	Browse all previously recorded audit sessions
sandspy daemon	Manage sandspy running as a persistent background service
sandspy profiles	List and manage loaded agent profiles

Global Options

Flag	Description
-d, --dashboard	Launch the full ratatui TUI dashboard instead of live stream
-v, --verbosity <LEVEL>	Set verbosity: low, medium, high, all (default: low)
-o, --output <FILE>	Write the raw session log to a file
--profile <NAME>	Force a specific agent profile instead of auto-detecting
--no-color	Disable colored output for CI/piping
--json	Stream all events as JSON lines (JSONL) to stdout

Examples

# Auto-detect and watch with the TUI dashboard
sandspy watch --dashboard

# Run silently in background, writing events to a log
sandspy watch --json -o session.jsonl

# Attach to a specific PID manually
sandspy attach 12345

# View your last 10 sessions
sandspy history

# Generate an HTML audit report for a specific session
sandspy report --session 2026-03-30-221652 --format Html

# Run the demo to explore the UI without a real agent
sandspy demo --dashboard

🏗️ Under The Hood

sandspy is designed for raw performance and enterprise-grade memory safety.

• Lock-Free Event Bus: Powered by tokio multi-threaded MPSC channels handling >10,000 events/sec without blocking your terminal.
• Cross-Platform: Operates flawlessly across Windows (Win32 / Native APIs), Linux (procfs), and macOS.
• Zero-Friction Engine: Does not require root elevation (sudo) or complex kernel drivers to observe process network tables. It safely hooks from standard user-space.

❤️ Contributing

sandspy is open-source and i would love your help to make it better! We want to support every AI agent in the world, and we need the community to help us establish baseline security.

Here are ways you can easily contribute today:

1. Add an Agent Profile: Did we miss an AI agent? You can add support for it in 2 minutes without knowing Rust. Just create a simple TOML configuration file in the profiles/ directory. Check out CONTRIBUTING_PROFILES.md for a quick guide!
2. Improve OS Abstractions: Expand our memory hooks for macOS and Linux.
3. Regex Expansion: Help us build out more complex Regex algorithms in src/analysis/secrets.rs to detect obscure database connection strings.

Please check out our detailed CONTRIBUTING.md to get started!

👋 About me & Why I Built This

I'm a college freshman, and to be completely transparent—this is my very first Open Source contribution!

This project was built over the span of about 3 days, following 2 days of architectural planning. I recently saw that Anthropic was generously offering premium plans to developers who build great stuff for the OSS community, and that genuinely inspired me cuz ive always wanted to contribute to open source. I've benefited from free, open-source software my entire life, and I finally wanted to step up and give something back.

I am still actively learning Rust. While I think the core idea of sandspy has massive potential, I'm yet to gain the advanced systems knowledge to scale it to its absolute limits entirely on my own right now. I know I sound naive (i am) but I'm trying my best to learn and improve.

If you find this concept cool, please leave a star ⭐, open an issue, or even submit a Pull Request! I would love for experienced developers to interact with this, improve the codebase, and help me learn in the process. I promise to keep working hard to build free, useful stuff for everyone.

Feel free to reach out to me on Discord — whether it's a bug, a crash on your machine, or just to say hi. I'm always around: icedcappus

Warning

A quick note on OS Support: Since I built and tested this entirely on a Windows machine, the Linux and macOS telemetry hooks haven't been aggressively stress-tested by me personally yet. If you run into any weird bugs on an Apple Silicon Mac or Ubuntu, please let me know! I'll do my absolute best to track down the fix.

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"trust but verify or something like that"