alt Hacker NewsAm I missing something, how is there any sort value in these assistants acting as agents on your behalf when they are basically a black box? Like if it can't use my drivers license or my phone number or my credit card, it can't do 75% of things people claim it can do without being massive security issues. What am I missing?
For the record I use OpenClaw but it has its own services (gmail address, phone number, etc.) and I don't give it any of mine, which inherently limits its capabilities.
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FWIW, my biggest use case for agents like this is ongoing research. I.e.: check Humble Bundle weekly and tell me if there’s a book bundle I might be interested in. Has the Music Box announced a film series I might want to visit Chicago for? That sort of thing; I want filters for the firehose.
I get a lot of value out of my Hermes setup, but it does not have my banking, or private data beyond GitHub projects that are shared with it. It has its own email and GitHub account, and access to drive Codex, Claude Code or Cursor. I treat it as an assistant via Slack.
It does research on products or real estate that I am interested in, it builds apps and other software projects for me, and does structured research on any topic. Information comes back to me via Slack, GitHub PRs, or websites/services served on the Mac that Hermes runs on.
Using an agent from Slack also adds a killer feature: multi-player contexts. I can work on changes with other human collaboators right in the same thread.
In the article the author mentions that Duet doesn't seek any sort of credentials and mentions connecting repos, so I think that this assistant is being used more for managing coding work in a different way than managing life work. I do agree that to get to true "personal assistant" levels, like planning a whole trip for you, booking tickets, etc. you'd have to give pretty much full access to your identity and money, but people claiming it can do that probably are just handing it over, security issues aside.
Yeah, that's the core of the issue:
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/
The "lethal trifecta": To be useful, an agent needs internet access, untrusted inputs, and your private information.
So it can get prompt injected and exfiltrate your data. (Indeed I read that Claude Code puts your email address into HTTP requests it makes to random servers?)
My solution here was to just not give it anything, but that does preclude the "my claw bought a car!" result everyone's excited about.
My way of thinking here is "blast radius". Assume it will get prompt injected. What goes wrong? Then design the setup so that scenario is not bad. e.g. it has my keys but they've got $5 of credit on them. It has access to the filesystem, but only on its own Linux account. (Ok I set this up last year before they could communicate thru the bloody CPU cache, might need an update :)