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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is more that you should not blame the user (why didn't you set up sandbox instead of directly using the tool of big corp) if a tool does something unexpected. If your Dropbox client would suddenly just upload your home directory instead of it's folder you configured you'd also not blame the user that they use Dropbox, you'd blame Dropbox for not doing their job correctly or being user hostile.
Agreed. You can still encourage people to use defense in depth without actively blaming them for not having the deepest moat imaginable. Software creators still have some responsibility
It’s kind of wild to watch in real time, instead of over the decades it took society for SA.
I feel this is worse than running rm -rf on a root directory. Just saying.
I once ran rm -rf on a live NFS mount that the live operations of a major brokerage depended upon. I challenge any agent to do worse than an intern with root access.
I once saw an engineer try to place the blame on his intern for taking down prod. I was sitting in a meeting with the VP of engineering and someone asked if it was ok for some to blame their intern for the SEV, and I remember the VP saying "I'll talk to $director_for_the_interns_mentor". Interns can't take down prod. An intern's mentor willingly watching an intern take down prod is the closest you can get.
Though I'm in the camp "people should really know to sandbox by now and be careful", I'd say we should also be mindful of how far from everyone has deep knowledge of the systems and tools they use. This behaviour of a tool is just malicious. You have to take into account the human factor, of how people likely end up using a system. And in this case, the consequences of exfiltrating so many secrets this way are really…
The real solution to these kind of problems is sandboxing. I use podman through a bash script to launch a container whenever I want an agent to work on one of my repos. When done I just generate git patches and port back everything generated. In this way I'm not afraid of letting the agents totally lose on my computer.
Are you doing something more advanced with Podman than just mounting the files? How is the access for relevant files given? How is the authentication shared across multiple uses? Just curious to streamline the process.
It copies the current Git repo into the sandboxes dir, mounts that copy at /workspace in the container. The original repo is never mounted writable, so I don't care if the agent goes to town/wild in there (peace of mind).
It also builds cached Debian/mise/Elixir/Phoenix images, can start a private Postgres container, publishes selected localhost ports, reuses dependency/build caches, and prints commands on exit for reviewing diffs, exporting patches, applying them back to the real repo, or reopening the same sandbox later. Pi, and OpenCode are configured with proper LLM access keys (derived from my own).
So spinning a new sandbox is a matter of cding into a project directory and run something like: `ai-sandbox --port 4000 --postgres somedbname` or `ai-sandbox --port 4001` if I don't need DB support. Then when running the server in the container I can access it from the host machine to review in my browser.
Is the Grok CLI a 2 terabyte install? Did Elon dropship you an 8U rack of B200s? No? Well the model weights, the GPUs, and the context obviously all have to be in the same place, so “sending your project to them” is literally the only thing that could possibly happen, unless you think agents work by fucking magic . This is the biggest case of PEBKAC in history, maybe ever. This is the kind of confusion that Charles B…
Haha so just send over your entire home directory including password managers and home videos every time you need some python code rewritten. Only a buffoon would be confused by the straightforward logic.
So many of the replies are saying that they should've restricted access using .md files and whatnot. Is really any guarantee that they even follow those? It seems like even if you ask pretty please don't touch those files, there's a chance they will. So many people have just willingly installed spyware on their computers and big tech calls this the next big thing.
This sort of thing is why I'm hopeful I'll continue to have employment going forward. Some expertise is hard won and there's just no replacing learning through experience.