A developer hired a penetration tester to attack his FastAPI staging environment and within 45 minutes the tester exploited leaked OpenAPI docs, an unprotected IDOR endpoint, a hard-coded JWT secret, a raw-SQL reporting endpoint, and lax webhook verification to gain full admin access and dump the database. The report lists critical flaws and warns of exposed production keys in staging.

The article introduces CUGA, IBM’s open-source agent harness that handles planning, execution loops, tool calls and state management so you only define tools and prompts. It walks through a FastAPI “cloud advisor” example and shows how two dozen single-file apps share the same skeleton for quick setup, governance and scaling.