Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#141

Post by jason1cho » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:04 AM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #121

mcmcmc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's someone who's more "code-naive" and might get anxious about approving random bash script commands they don't recognize. Maybe they should trust their instinct and not mess with things they don’t care to understand

I am using many many many things that I don't understand. Cars, public transport, etc... I review and test the end product, not every tiny step along the way. If the LLM uses some command line tools I have never heard of to create a model I can verify, why should I learn a tool that is completely irrelevant to my core expertise?

Many many people care more than the end product, for example whether a shirt is made of cotton with the forced labor, carbon emissions of public transport, etc.

In terms of engineering software, you care the cost. An intelligent agent may try to read unnecessary files and it's time to stop it to save tokens and avoid polluting the context.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#142

Post by tonis2 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:08 AM UTC

awkii wrote: post #52

I'm apparently from the very small faction of users who's been running `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in every instance of Claude for the last year. It's almost a reflex to me. For the most part Claude behaves well, but I don't blindly trust it. LLMs are inherently dangerous tools, and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so. Safety is the responsibility of the developer putting sa…

My issue is that the auto mode guard rail model, is sometimes overwhelmed and really slow, so I also mostly just default to --dangerously-skip-permissions. I wish the command would be easier to write like --dsp

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#143

Post by bsdz » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:11 AM UTC

For small projects where I don't wish to interact with Claude so much, I've started using Anthropic's sandbox runtime utility "srt":

https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime

This is combined with "auto" mode.

Seems to work so far. I've manually checked various things, rw access, access to sensitive folders/files etc.

So far, I've only used it on two small projects. My major projects I've been clicking through prompts and recently switched to "auto" mode.

I'm not quite sure why anyone would trust "--dangerously-skip-permissions". I've seen these agents go off-piste far too many times, installing unnecessary packages, environments, calling sudo & creating files in all sorts of places.

There's a page on various sandboxing strategies on their site:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sandbox-environments

I've seen various comments in several topics with folk baking their own sandboxes. That's great. Although I'd be inclined to try Anthropic's solutions initially.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#144

Post by paul_h » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:11 AM UTC

awkii wrote: post #52

I'm apparently from the very small faction of users who's been running `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in every instance of Claude for the last year. It's almost a reflex to me. For the most part Claude behaves well, but I don't blindly trust it. LLMs are inherently dangerous tools, and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so. Safety is the responsibility of the developer putting sa…

I think all of Anthropic's own staff use --dangerously else they'd work on the usability of the massively imperfect 1-approve-once and 2-approve-forever multi-choice and outcome.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#145

Post by 9dev » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:13 AM UTC

raesene9 wrote: post #115

It's great that they're making the auto usage tokens free by default and I guess auto mode will be a good default for a lot of workloads, but recent changes to the auto mode classifier just moved me to either use YOLO mode or use a different harness. I've been using Opus 4.6 for some security related work (it has much looser guardails that later opus models) and last week, all of a sudden, the processes started to fa…

What works in that case is adding a message saying "I authorise you to do $thing", which the classifier treats as explicit consent to do something and execute commands toward that goal.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#146

Post by jason1cho » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

lukan wrote: post #37

levocardia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default is set for the marginal new user, which at this point is probably not someone like you (who benefits a lot from manual mode) -- it's someone who's more "code-naive" and might get anxious about approving random bash script commands they don't recognize. Safely getting the user from prompt --> first vibe-coded app is the "user journey" now, and since auto mode seems pretty good at not letting Claude rm -rf'…

I am actually curious, how much non programmers use claude now. I know just one and she really does not know much about computers, I suppose their numbers will grow (but I doubt most get much value out of it).

I think a lot of non programmers use Claude.

I mean if you don't care code, you are essentially a product manager who gives instructions to your programmers (whether humans or intelligent agents).

Then if you use the created product, you are at best a test engineer if not just an ordinary user.

I think in the era of AI, people get tools they want in an expensive way. Rather than finding an existing tool, they ask an intelligent agent to parrot one, which guarantees no safety, security, efficiency, and accuracy. Yet, being able to use Claude makes them feel smart and productive (in parroting wheels).

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#147

Post by faeyanpiraat » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

trvz wrote: post #112

supermatt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are 3rd party hosted VMs safer than your own?

They're not. When things go wrong it's better to compromise someone else's VM host than your own computer. It's only a matter of time now until AI will find novel ways to break out of virtualisation.

In the short term wouldnt a “dont escape” prompt prevent this? Also if it started being widespread wouldnt Anthropic specifically train new models against doing it?

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#148

Post by sheept » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:16 AM UTC

awkii wrote: post #52

I'm apparently from the very small faction of users who's been running `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in every instance of Claude for the last year. It's almost a reflex to me. For the most part Claude behaves well, but I don't blindly trust it. LLMs are inherently dangerous tools, and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so. Safety is the responsibility of the developer putting sa…

I use dontAsk mode[0] with read access to the entire file system, write access to files from the working directory[1], some git commands (git commit yes, git push no), and a script wrapping Deno with the same read/write permissions (safer substitute for `python -c`).

These are usually enough for most of my coding tasks. In my experience, Claude has been good enough that it can write code and fix bugs without needing anything else. It's far better than ever needing to approve permission requests.

[0]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permission-modes#available-m...

[1]: Note that this includes escaping the directory via symlinks

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#149

Post by eru » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

jawiggins wrote: post #132

eru wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The permissions system seems to be mostly finegrained to help you from problems that backups and sandboxes already solve. The more dangerous activities I find are sending messages to the outside world: I can't undo a dumb slack message to my boss.

That's fair, I have sent a, "Sorry claude sent that and I didn't tell him to", message before.

The big problem is that in general I want slack to be able to send some messages (otherwise I would ban that). But the difference between good and bad messages is something that's hard to judge mechanically.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#150

Post by rcfox » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

Auto mode feels like a solution to a problem they created. Whitelisting commands used to work fairly well until the agents started generating complex bash commands that it gave up trying to classify.

"Oh you're piping grep into sed, I have no idea what the implications of that are!"

The more complex bash scripts are perhaps better or more efficient, but it feels like it's training us to give up more control to the agent.

I'd prefer to have an auto mode for read-only operations and go back to simpler commands for write operations that I can personally whitelist or manually accept.