Hence the article’s security theatre remark.
I’m not sure why everyone seems to have forgotten about Unix permissions, proper sandboxing, jails, VMs etc when building agents.
Even just running the agent as a different user with minimal permissions and jailed into its home directory would be simple and easy enough.
The thing is that on macOS at least, Codex does have the ability use an actual sandbox that I believe prevents certain write operations and network access.
I'm just guessing, but seems the people who write these agent CLIs haven't found a good heuristic for allowing/disallowing/asking the user about permissions for commands, so instead of trying to sit down and actually figure it out, someone had the bright idea to let the LLM also manage that allowing/disallowing themselves. How that ever made sense, will probably forever be lost on me.
`chroot` is literally the first thing I used when I first installed a local agent, by intuition (later moved on to a container-wrapper), and now I'm reading about people who are giving these agents direct access to reply to their emails and more.