alt Hacker NewsHas anyone had Claude Code or Codex approve a harmful/damaging command in auto mode?
I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident (or at least haven't noticed). Maybe as capabilities get better and better and they are less likely to do something dumb like wiping ~/, we can just trust them?
I guess this argument works unless we worry about agents doing something out of malice instead of stupidity.
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No. I haven't approved commands in more than a year. Worst that I've seen was some agent running git checkout -- in a repo with uncommitted changes. Annoying, but not catastrophic.
Imo these explicit tool-level permissions are really just a bandaid for bad sandboxing. Just be aware of where you are running your agent and what data is at risk of being destroyed or compromised. Assume that arbitrary code can run at any time and be prepared to recover from that.
Just yesterday it lost my git stash (I had recovered it from a backup). I think for code operations it's ok but as soon as file removal is involved (like git) the auto mode is destined to make a mistake and you only need to learn this once.
I've been using Kilo Code (with MiniMax M3) with auto approve (similar to dangerously skip permissions) and I haven't had a single incident.
However, I don't give it long running tasks unsupervised, and I do interrupt it from time to time to give suggestions.
Not anything ”harmful” but for example committing when I don’t want it to commit on its own.
I've had a few occasions where Claude Code thought that it had caught and stopped a malicious command in Auto mode, but in all cases it turned out that it had in fact hallucinated them. I haven't seen this happen in a while.
Been doing --dangerously-skip-permissions and --yolo for 6 months now, and no nothing bad has happened.
> I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident
I've been running both in yolo mode and haven't had a single incident.
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None of this is really about figuring out how to protect people's drives, in my opinion. The real issue is a deep session where Ada is using Claude Code to get a refund and at some point the system "exploits" the merchant's api without any malicious intent.
In my opinion, this is a complex thing because it's more about reward hacking and an already aligned model thinking it's doing the right thing. So another aligned model monitoring actions might just falter via inheritance. You could imagine they account for proper layering/intent+action-isolation in their auto mode architecture.