Even worse, explicitly telling it not to do something makes it more likely to do it. It's not intelligent. It's a probability machine write large. If you say "don't git push --force", that command is now part of the context window dramatically raising the probability of it being "thought" about, and likely to appear in the output.

Like you say, the only way to stop it from doing something is to make it impossible for it to do so. Shove it in a container. Build LLM safe wrappers around the tools you want it to be able to run so that when it runs e.g. `git`, it can only do operations you've already decided are fine.