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ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

simonwillison.net

161–170 of 336 posts

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#162

Nice work detective Simon! I love these “discovery” posts the most because you can’t find this stuff anywhere.

Absolutely, when people discover and share there's something fun to it beyond press releases and commentary. Creative and inspiring post

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of my LLM projects are written in Rust - and I have never personally written a single line of Rust. Compilation alone eliminates a number of 'category errors' with software - syntax, variable declaration, types, etc. It's why I've used Go for the majority of projects I've started the past ten years. But with Rust there is a second layer of guarantees that come from its design, around things like concurrency, nil…

> ... and eliminates choice from the LLMs. Perl is right out! Maybe the LLMs could help us decipher extent Perl "write once, maintain never" code.

it's very good at this BTW

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#164
post #57
post #24

... as root?

No root. `pip` and `npm install` don't require it. You can not use `sudo apt install` inside it. They use gVisor, and other container isolation mechanisms: https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/

OTOH if you have apt, you have arbitrary shell commands (hooray dpkg-hooks!)

Golden years for cybersecurity people

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#165
post #145
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG here (service oriented arch, distributed systems) and id say probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends, works well with test generation, or following an existing paradigm. I think a lot of people wrote it off initially as it was low quality. But gemini 3 pro or sonnet 4.5 saves me a ton of time at work these days. Perfect? Absolutely not. Good enough for tons of run…

> probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends Frontend has always been shitshow since JS dynamic web UIs invented. With it and CSS no one cares what runs page and how many Mb it takes to show one button. But regarding the backend, the vibecoding still rare, and we are still lucky it is like that, and there was no train crush because of it. Yet.

I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.

It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#168

As an infosec guy I'm going to go ahead and buy a bigger house

Well either way, the infosec folks are going to have the time of their lives printing write-ups and lots of money on both sides.

I can see the sandbox escapes, remote code exection paths, exfiltration methods and all the vibe coded sandcastles waiting to be knocked down because we have folks openly admiting that do not know a single line of code they are prompting to the AI.

I don't think we know the scale of the amout of security issues we will see because of the level of hubris there is with AI taking care of all of the coding.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#169
post #5

I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.). Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and m…

> Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. First I don't think this is the end of those languages. I still write code in Ruby almost daily, mostly to solve smaller issues; Ruby acts as the ultimate glue that connects everything here. Having said that, Ruby is on a path to extinction. That started way before AI though and has many different reasons; it happened to perl before and now ruby…

> One good advantage of e. g. Python and Ruby is that they are excellent at prototyping ideas into code. That part won't go away, even if AI infiltrates more computers.

Why wouldn't they go away for prototyping? If an LLM can help you prototype in whatever language, why pick Ruby or Python?

(This isn't a gotcha question. I primarily use python these days, but I'm not married to it).

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#170
post #5

I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.). Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and m…

Peak LLM will be when we can give some prompt and just get fully compiled binaries of programs to download, no code at all.
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