alt Hacker NewsAuto mode may be significantly safer in the niche case where you want the model to have free reign, in a fully unopinionated environment, where it's allowed to make any changes and make any external calls.
Many of the problems when it comes to the manual approval feel like they stem from the expectation of using auto mode in the first place. After all, what's the point of improving the manual approval and safety matching if auto mode is the end all be all, and what's the point of training the model to output commands in a manner that can be parsed by a human if auto mode is always meant to be used? It's very rare for me to not see "command could not be statically analyzed", because the model keeps outputting bash golf.
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Auto mode seems to have some reasonable restrictions baked in. For example if you give claude access to two k8s namespaces, seriousproject-qa and seriousproject-prod, auto-mode will grant `kubectl exec` on the qa environment while denying the same command for the production environment. Of course you should be enforcing that by restricting what kind of access tokens you give claude access to, but auto-mode does have opinions about this stuff too, even if it's not bulletproof
However I do share your desire for a better manual mode. Auto-mode is both sometimes surprisingly lax, and sometimes too restrictive. Maybe manual mode should inject a reminder "keep your commands as simple one-liners", the same way plan mode injects a reminder that you are in plan mode and don't want any code changes
> in the niche case where you want the model to have free reign, in a fully unopinionated environment, where it's allowed to make any changes and make any external calls.
That is not the niche case, that's the dominant use of models.
It would be helpful to distinguish between your own opinion on how models ought to be used, compared to how others actually use models.