Least privilege is the principle that any actor, human or agent, should hold only the access its work actually requires, and only for as long as it does that work.
It is easy to state and hard to sustain, because access is usually granted to individuals and individuals accumulate it. That is permission creep, and agents make it worse: an agent given broad credentials so it can be useful keeps them long after the task that justified them.
Binding access to a role rather than to a person changes the default. The access belongs to the role, so whoever fills it reaches exactly what the role needs, and someone leaving the role loses it as a consequence of governance rather than as a chore somebody has to remember. An assistant helping a person inherits that person's access and cannot exceed it.
The test of a least-privilege design is not whether it can be locked down, but whether the ordinary path produces a narrow grant without anyone having to be diligent.
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