Flag and block invasive assessments

[eddie-knight]

User story

As a highly regulated user running compliance validation against live infrastructure, I would like a way to guarantee that Privateer and its plugins cannot make changes to any resources — so that a misconfigured or misbehaving plugin can never mutate infrastructure it was only supposed to observe.

Context

The invasive flag exists, but it's a config option — which means it can be misconfigured, overridden, or simply omitted. In a regulated environment, a compliance tool modifying live infrastructure would itself be an audit finding. A config flag doesn't provide the hard guarantee needed to satisfy that concern.

Potential Solution

These are notes from Claude, intended only to kickoff brainstorming:

• A runtime flag (e.g. --read-only) that disables all invasive capabilities at the harness level, regardless of plugin or config
• When active, any plugin attempting a write operation should fail with a clear error — not silently skip
• Ideally enforced in the SDK so plugin authors can't accidentally bypass it