alt Hacker NewsAuto mode feels like a solution to a problem they created. Whitelisting commands used to work fairly well until the agents started generating complex bash commands that it gave up trying to classify.
"Oh you're piping grep into sed, I have no idea what the implications of that are!"
The more complex bash scripts are perhaps better or more efficient, but it feels like it's training us to give up more control to the agent.
I'd prefer to have an auto mode for read-only operations and go back to simpler commands for write operations that I can personally whitelist or manually accept.
sed can be used to edit files (with the -i option). Not sure how this interacts with piping to its STDIN, but I wouldn't automatically assume `grep | sed` is safe.
I was thinking about this the other day, standard UNIX utilities seem poorly suited for this because they have so many weird options/flags with "unsafe" side effects. I have no idea if grep, for example, has some niche option to make it write/edit/delete files, so I wouldn't be comfortable blanket whitelisting it.