Matt Maisel

CTO and Co-Founder of Sondera. 15 years at the intersection of machine learning, security, and software engineering.

Presented “Hooking Coding Agents with Cedar” at [un]prompted Conference, Stage 2, March 3, 2026.

Earlier name confusion (corrected 2026-05-04)

The session-6 hot cache used “Sondera Maisel” as if the org name were part of the person’s name. The auto-generated transcript also misspelled the org as “Sendera.” The correct spelling, confirmed by the slide deck and the company homepage at sondera.ai, is Sondera. See Sondera for the org page.

Contributions to this wiki

• Introduced the trajectory event model (action / observation / control / state) as the structural unit for coding-agent policy enforcement.
• Built the hook-based Cedar harness — open-source reference implementation that wires coding-agent lifecycle hooks (Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI) to a Cedar PDP with YARA signatures, information-flow control, and a safety model.
• Proposed the policy agent pattern — using an LLM to generate Cedar policies from informal intent (CLAUDE.md, Cursor Rules), then verifying them with Cedar’s own formal tools exposed over MCP.

See also

• Sondera — the company he co-founded
• Hooking Coding Agents with Cedar (talk summary)
• Cedar — the policy language at the center of his architecture