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verdvermtoday at 9:07 PM1 replyview on HN

Totally agree and this is actually on my short list. I use opencode, so one will need a custom plugin to gate tool calls. They have permission config, which I'm using to block file reads, but the orchestrator is allowed to use specific subagents for more targeted reviews, and they have file read permissions, which the main agent is abusing.

Some of them can be deterministic rules, but others cannot. For example, if you want to permit the GH cli for adding comments, but not merging...

1. GitHub has not provided granular enough tokens

2. You can wildcard in the opencode config

3. The agent can work around this with bash, if it has access

4. The agent apparently will also use subagents, who do have the permission, to work around it's own permission limitations. (This is the problem I'm actually facing)

This pattern is the "relentlessly proactive" as Simon Willison calls Fable, or "artificially incessant" as I called it this week (kimi in this case). It's the same training that enables the long-horizon task completion and mythos style hacking, double edged sword.

I think it unlikely we can block all avenues with deterministic only tools. I'm also looking at policy tuned micro llms, and then creating a merged 'or' signal from the various checks. Later I can look into loosening the signal if there are too many false-positives


Replies

brunocalzatoday at 9:38 PM

This is interesting. Thanks for sharing more. Looks like it's a trade-off of it being relentless, which is something we want in some cases. We need to figure out a way of closing the door and at the same time signaling the door is closed so it does not keep trying different manners.

I've been thinking about this but in a different context: non-coding agents. e.g., an AI agent that approves travel expenses is not allowed to approve expenses bigger than X USD (no matter what). In this case, it looks closer to an ACL thing.