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cornholioyesterday at 9:39 PM1 replyview on HN

What do you think about CaMeL and similar approaches?

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/


Replies

veganmosfettoday at 7:20 AM

Good question.

CaMeL is imho safer, but hard to implement into modern agents like OpenClaw. Its core idea is that a privileged LLM plans from the (trusted) user request only, while a restricted interpreter executes that plan (and enforces policies). Untrusted content is parsed separately and is not fed back into the privileged LLM.

Modern agents are useful exactly because they run a feedback loop (observe, reason, adapt, use tools, repeat). CaMeL breaks that loop, which improves security but makes it a poor fit for highly general agents like OpenClaw.