Has anyone had Claude Code or Codex approve a harmful/damaging command in auto mode? I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident (or at least haven't noticed). Maybe as capabilities get better and better and they are less likely to do something dumb like wiping ~/, we can just trust them? I guess this argument works unless we worry about agents doing something…
No. I haven't approved commands in more than a year. Worst that I've seen was some agent running git checkout -- in a repo with uncommitted changes. Annoying, but not catastrophic. Imo these explicit tool-level permissions are really just a bandaid for bad sandboxing. Just be aware of where you are running your agent and what data is at risk of being destroyed or compromised. Assume that arbitrary code can run at any…
Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
271–280 of 335 posts
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#272Earlier 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
What an awful position to take. Tech used to be about becoming more accessible to people! Now we have a magical assistant to make computers do what you want with natural language, and your desire is gate keeping that so only programmers can use it to write software for themselves?
Yes?
The idea of an assistant that can use natural language is nice! But why would you MAKE software with it, it IS software, just do the thing you want to do! If you want to make an app, be prepared to jump hoops because this is no longer about YOU the user, it's about OTHER users.
The idea of making personal single user software is a fantasy, an oxymoron, you MAKE software? there's the presumption that it will be used for other people, otherwise you'd be USING software. There's a counter and you are at either one side or the other. It's the difference between making yourself a sandwich vs making a pot pie vs making chicken nuggets. One has the form factor for individual consumption and the other has the form factor for a social gathering, and the latter is an industrial form factor.
Maybe if there were a magic microwave that created random foods from thin air, people would create chicken nuggets or pot pies for themselves, but it's a vestigial maladaptation that will soon dissapear. Any reasonably designed product would try to provide different UX for industrial and individual users. The magic microwave that makes chicken nuggets better not be the same one that an actual factory is using. It's not a matter of cutting the middleman and revolutionizing wealth distribution from those fat chicken-nugget cats, it's about having two distinct products for two distinct usecases.
Tl;dr: Personal and industrial usecases are different, and if I'm in the industry, I don't want to use (the same product that end-users are using) to build products. What a clusterfuck.
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#273I use `--dangerously-skip-permissions` and have yet to have it wipe my drive :shrug:. I don't know how I'm supposed to be running dozens of parallel agents each with their own sub-agents while trying to approve commands from each of them, it's just won't scale to the amount of work I need to get done.
Why not let it delete stuff in the current working folder and in tmp, but give it read-only access elsewhere?
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#274I'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…
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#275I'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 manually approve everything (aside from the "allow commands like this" option). Not because I'm worried it's about to do something harmful but because I want to stop it from wasting tokens doing something stupid like implementing a feature I never asked ask for. I'm not even reading the commands, just checking it's going in vaguely the right direction. I think my ideal setup would not involve approving commands, bu…
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#276For example, and this is minor but it annoys me, I like to declare variables in var() blocks if they relate to each other instead of using various := statements, and despite very clear STYLE.md, CLAUDE.md, and a personal style skill that is loaded on every session, Fable still insists on using :=, so I have to correct it from time to time.
It seems like auto mode would change that workflow. Hopefully, there is a setting somewhere to go back to the previous version. Otherwise, it might be time to finally give Pi a chance.
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#277I'll let you draw the analogy.
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I manually approve everything (aside from the "allow commands like this" option). Not because I'm worried it's about to do something harmful but because I want to stop it from wasting tokens doing something stupid like implementing a feature I never asked ask for. I'm not even reading the commands, just checking it's going in vaguely the right direction. I think my ideal setup would not involve approving commands, bu…
You can get some approximation of that with more detailed plans. I use a prompt like "Let's make a detailed plan. Write plan files as markdown to plans/feature-XYZ. [regular prompt]". That way you get much more thorough plans than with plan mode, and you can make it as detailed and deep as you want. It can't account for things that only come up during implementation. But you can explore much more of the design space…
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#279I review and approve every single line written by Claude because I want it to code like me, in my style. Yes, even with the bugs and problems I would introduce if I wrote it myself. Part of that is because I break from “idiomatic Go” from time to time because something reads better to my eyes. For example, and this is minor but it annoys me, I like to declare variables in var() blocks if they relate to each other ins…
Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
#280Besides the debate about whether this is "safer" than manual human review, I have a slightly different problem. Very often, when I'm running Claude in manual review mode, it will attempt to do things which are not "dangerous" but are misaligned with what I want it to do. Maybe I'm fighting the model here but for example, when orchestrating other agents to do work, Claude really badly wants to be overly prescriptive a…