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msdztoday at 3:27 PM3 repliesview on HN

This is the correct response, but it also feels as though ≈nobody is sandboxing their agents/harnesses in practice. Or at least, a good majority isn’t.


Replies

cortesofttoday at 3:57 PM

I think there is a cycle, like with most things of this nature.

You start really locked down, and you read and approve every request for access. You do this for a while, but never see a result you deny, so you stop reading as closely. You keep hitting that approve button. You start paying even less attention to it. You start feeling silly, like you are simply slowing the process down. You get frustrated, because you keep coming back to your session and realizing your agent has been stuck waiting for approval for a long time, and the task that would have been done by now hasn’t even started.

Now you are running even more simultaneous sessions, which means more and more of your agents are stuck waiting for your approval. You feel even sillier, because you are taking even less time now to review and approve requests, but your review step is causing more and more slowdowns because you have more sessions going so you take longer between approvals. You feel like you are spending most of your time cycling through sessions hitting approve. You still have not come across a request that was dangerous or would have caused an issue, so you feel more and more like you are wasting your time.

So you slowly start to give your agents more access with fewer review steps.

Maybe this results in a catastrophic failure at some point, or maybe it doesn’t.

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embedding-shapetoday at 3:58 PM

AFAIK, I know plenty of frontend engineers that without blinking run "npm install" on random 3rd party projects they find on GitHub, and they do their banking and everything else on the same machine. But then again, I also know people (one person to be fair) who have unprotected sex with prostitutes, so maybe something makes me slightly biased here.

bigstrat2003today at 4:02 PM

I mean yeah, there are a ton of people who are stupid enough to disregard all kind of safety precautions. That doesn't mean the safety precautions are invalid though.