alt Hacker NewsIDE = “I’ll delete everything”
…at least if you let these things autopilot your machine.
I haven’t seen a great solution to this from the new wave of agentic IDEs, at least to protect users who won’t read every command, understand and approve it manually.
Education could help, both in encouraging people to understand what they’re doing, but also to be much clearer to people that turning on “Turbo” or “YOLO” modes risks things like full disk deletion (and worse when access to prod systems is involved).
Even the name, “Turbo” feels irresponsible because it focusses on the benefits rather than the risks. “Risky” or “Danger” mode would be more accurate even if it’s a hard sell to the average Google PM.
“I toggled Danger mode and clicked ‘yes I understand that this could destroy everything I know and love’ and clicked ‘yes, I’m sure I’m sure’ and now my drive is empty, how could I possibly have known it was dangerous” seems less likely to appear on Reddit.
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> …at least if you let these things autopilot your machine.
I've seen people wipe out their home directories writing/debugging shell scripts...20 years ago.
The point is that this is nothing new and only shows up on the front page now because "AI must be bad".
I don’t think there is a solution. It’s the way LLMs work at a fundamental level.
It’s a similar reason why they can never be trusted to handle user input.
They are probabilistic generators and have no real delineation between system instructions and user input.
It’s like I wrote a JavaScript function where I concatenated the function parameters together with the function body, passed it to eval() and said YOLO.
The solution I go for is, don't ever run a coding agent on a general purpose machine.
Use a container or VM, place the code you're working on in the container or VM and run the agent there.
Between the risk of the agent doing things like what happened here, and the risk of working on a malicious repository causing your device to be compromised, it seems like a bad plan to give them access to any more than necessary.
Of course this still risks losing things like the code you're working on, but decent git practices help to mitigate that risk.