I find a lot of people take a very backward approach to agents: They adopt desktop versions with full access first, and only later discover sandboxes and cloud environments.

Claude and ChatGPT both come with free cloud sandboxes that work great! If they are just writing code there's little reason to hand over your laptop.

At work we have rather strict rules for how to run AI agents, and for good reasons apparently. The problem is that once these rules are in place and enforced, using an agent is just more hassle that I feel it's worth. The agents work in complete isolation in a VM with access to pretty much nothing. Some colleagues are making good use of them, but just looking at the policies and tooling we have put in place makes me give up in advance.