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petesergeant • yesterday at 6:10 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I spend literally all my work day, and a good bit of my personal time, talking to agents, getting them to do things on my behalf. Almost always pretty tightly sandboxed. I just don't understand how people using these things haven't had catastrophic failures yet.

I minted what I thought was a minimal-permission Github token for a single action, and the agent I gave it to discovered it had more permissions than I thought, and made use of those permissions. Who is trusting these things with write access to their lives?


Replies

AspireOne • yesterday at 11:36 PM

I have the opposite approach to you.

- AI is sitting on my two personal servers as root with unrestricted access to everything. I task them with deploying stuff, checking and patching security holes, reconfiguring the firewall, etcetera. It literally never failed at anything, didn't go "off the rails", didn't break anything.

- The other day, in order to deploy a fork of Plane.so, I gave an AI an full-permission token to my Coolify, to my Cloudflare account (so it could change DNS and Tunnel settings), and unrestricted SSH access to my server and to my browser via the Playwright Chrome extension. No issues.

- I have AI running unrestricted on my computer doing all kinds of stuff.

I literally never had any issues with this approach. Not a single one. I don't think there's as much of a need for sandboxing as some people would like to believe.

solooperator1 • yesterday at 6:44 PM

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