alt Hacker NewsIf you're using agents to purely generate code with absolutely no way to reach the outside world, not even to fetch docs or dependencies, then sure the risks can be quite low. I haven't heard of anyone doing this though, and it would be incredibly challenging to make work given how much tooling needs to fetch from remote sources.
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If your project truly depends on those things, they should be declared dependencies. Presumably you have some tool for injecting such things into a shell that the agent can use (I use nix for this). So if you run the agent from that shell, it has what it needs. If the shell doesn't have what it needs, that's a bug which the agent can fix by declaring new dependencies, but you have to relaunch the agent in the updated shell--so there's your opportunity to weigh in on whether the new resources are appropriate.
The benefits of being persnickety about precisely defined dependencies have outweighed the headaches since long before agents came on the scene. Agents have just made it even more important to do so, because if you let them fetch things all willy nilly like you'll have "works on my machine" problems at a much greater rate than was previously possible.
In cases where you need agents to fetch data from any remote source, sandboxing is still very much useful. Why give access to your ssh keys to network reaching agents?
Look at websites: websites are able to fetch code from any remote URL, yet browsers heavily use sandboxing to ensure that if fetched code turns out to be malicious, the users local files, cookies, etc are not exposed.
Every major AI company already has a mirror of the wider web, and they have already started using that. Its already a solved problem except for the seemingly extreme desire they all have to not use firewalls