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Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

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Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#311

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Silhouette wrote: post #246
thunfischtoast wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've caught Fable discovering the ip to a production server in documentation and attempting to connect there on its own to run commands without explicitly being prompted to. It didn't work because I was watching it live and and also the key was password protected, but yeah, I do see some danger.

My point is that an LLM can't attempt to connect to anything by itself. All an LLM does is produce a stream of output tokens - and that was already quite useful as a coding aid. It is the harnesses that some people are now wrapping around LLMs to interpret the output from a model as commands to run (or other executable instructions) that are creating all these new risks. Remember that this is still a very recent deve…

Once you're running a model inside the harness... you've got yourself a controller inside a control loop, which is genuinely a different kind of thing than just the model alone.

Are you objecting to terminology here?

Are you proposing we say "Fable-In-Claude-Code tried..." instead?

Hmmm... something like that might be necessary. Sure we should typically be tolerant of loose language; but people do keep referring to wildly different contexts in ai conversations, and end up talking past each other.

Running gemini on web is a genuinely different experience to running Fable in claude code, different again from GPT-5.6 in openclaw, or in an ide or etc ...

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#312

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Silhouette wrote: post #245
dist-epoch wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do not allow the other part of the system to act on one if it would be harmful Network security is really easy right, just don't act on harmful requests

If you don't understand clearly what an action proposed by your tool is going to do then why would you permit it?

The article is about measurements taken on this.

One important reason is due to Permission Fatigue: Of course you check everything! You're diligent! The last 100 requests were all ok, so you're down to hitting yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes ...

... oops, that third yes should have been a no!

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#313

Post by TZubiri »

retsibsi wrote: post #304
TZubiri wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should invoke an LLM every time I want to read a book or do a crossword. Well no, I'd say, use any of the existing 100 book readers to read a book, or any of 50 crossword apps. But if you want to use an LLM to customize it the exact way you want it. Yes, use the LLM every time you want to do it. Wanting the LLM to do a previous gen app and then get out of the way sounds like asking for faster horses. Just tell th…

I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible. Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the int…

I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software.

Broadly speaking, your approach would be to have the LLM write application code, my approach would be for the LLM to write commands, 'apt-get install calibre', maybe if I want to add or modify a button I can ask it to hack the X interface. You go straight for the LLM generating the code. There's certainly technical differences between what we are doing, but they are very arbitrary, we are essentially doing the same thing, but what I am doing looks less impressive, and what you are doing you can sell in your CV to potential hiring managers as 'using AI to write software'. It's more about the semantics than the actual requirements.

I may be wrong though, maybe your approach is far more effective than just importing transitive dependencies, but I would think it's more about taking credit for the thing and increasing your sense of ownership and achievement. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I just need a way to think of myself as better than others as an unemployed neverviber.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#314

Post by supermatt »

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.

So the concern is that the agent will discover a novel VM escape, exploit it and take control of your whole machine instead of working on its prompted task? That seems rather far fetched.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#315

Post by Silhouette »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #311
Silhouette wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that an LLM can't attempt to connect to anything by itself. All an LLM does is produce a stream of output tokens - and that was already quite useful as a coding aid. It is the harnesses that some people are now wrapping around LLMs to interpret the output from a model as commands to run (or other executable instructions) that are creating all these new risks. Remember that this is still a very recent deve…

Once you're running a model inside the harness... you've got yourself a controller inside a control loop, which is genuinely a different kind of thing than just the model alone. Are you objecting to terminology here? Are you proposing we say "Fable-In-Claude-Code tried..." instead? Hmmm... something like that might be necessary. Sure we should typically be tolerant of loose language; but people do keep referring to w…

Yes - I'm objecting to the lazy use of terminology here. LLMs are useful in their own right and are not the real problem here. The real problem is people placing too much trust in inherently unreliable output and then trying to automate away their responsibility to check that output properly before using it.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#316

Post by preg_match »

coldtea wrote: post #235
mlrtime wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are ssh keys going to be leaked, the agent never needs to read them.

The agent decides what it "needs" to read - not the intention behind the prompt you gave it. A failed SSH connection to a staging server for example, can trivially make it look into .ssh to try to diagnose it. And many other ways, including prompt injection. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1q7dszm/claude_al... https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/31566 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/…

The solution I've come up with is podman containers. You can restrict the filesystem and only give it access to dev tools. I don't even allow git, as I review and commit everything on the host. It's not perfect because podman containers can be leaked out of, but it's much better than running it on the host. It also allows me to avoid installing node or npm on the host.

If you were to get pwned by Claude, I would think the method would be Claude rogue installing a compromised npm package.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#317

Post by kevincox »

user43928 wrote: post #174
jkaretsky wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this new? I remember something in the UI saying Auto mode uses x% more tokens

Yes, it's in the article: > The auto mode classifier uses a small number of extra tokens per tool call, and we're no longer charging Claude Code users on Pro, Max, and Team plans for that classifier overhead, effective today

This just sounds like they bump their unspecified limits by N% to cover this usage. Which of course means nothing because the next time they re-evaluate their limits they will just ignore this bump.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#318

Post by retsibsi »

TZubiri wrote: post #313
retsibsi wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a future where it might make sense. Right now, though, it would make for a far worse experience, and wouldn't even really be practically possible. Both of those examples were real ones. The crossword app runs on my phone, pulls the crosswords from a specific source, and lets me access and solve them via the exact interface I prefer. The ebook app is cross platform, syncs via a remote server, has the int…

I get that you are doing that, but I think the fantasy is that this is creation of software instead of consumption. It's an issue adjacent to licence washing, where mangling some code through an inference layer is considered transformative or even unrelated and the original license doesn't apply. But in this case, what you are washing is not the license, but the valor of writing software. Broadly speaking, your appro…

Thanks, I think I understand your point better now. In this case, though, you are wrong about both my intentions and the relative practical value of the two approaches (to me).

I'm not doing this to take creative or intellectual credit in any external way; you're right that there is some degree of increased personal satisfaction (which I don't see as a problem, as long as it doesn't crowd out more wholesome ways of 'earning' that satisfaction), but I'm not kidding myself about what I've actually done here. I also write my own code for fun/creative expression/intellectual stimulation/showing off, but that's a separate thing and there's not much crossover between the two types of project for me.

And the end products really are useful to me in a way that I couldn't replicate just by using something that already exists, and couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code. Ideally I would be giving something back by making a useful contribution to the public repo(s), but that would turn this into a completely different, more tedious and effortful thing, and I'm not sure it would be welcome anyway. So, case by case, I choose whichever approach seems likely to be more effective or efficient or less annoying, and sometimes that means getting Claude to write something 'from scratch'; other times there's an open source application I already use that just needs some tweaking, and I start with that.)

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#319

Post by Silhouette »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #312
Silhouette wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand clearly what an action proposed by your tool is going to do then why would you permit it?

The article is about measurements taken on this. One important reason is due to Permission Fatigue: Of course you check everything! You're diligent! The last 100 requests were all ok, so you're down to hitting yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes ... ... oops, that third yes should have been a no!

This seems like a problem with the level of abstraction the user interface is working at. It is highly unlikely that in any real world task lasting less than one day there were really hundreds of distinct decisions that needed to be made by the user about appropriate actions to be taken by the agent/harness. It is also highly unlikely that the problem of decision fatigue seen here is somehow magically different to the same problem that countless UI designers had encountered and designed around in other systems long before harnesses running LLMs came along.

This is unfortunately the kind of result you get when you eliminate skilled and experienced people with real understanding of their field and replace them with repeated automatically-generated attempts to solve the same problem until something meeting some basic standard of correctness is found. It's as if the story of agentic AI as it exists today had been compressed into one perfect example of what it can do that is good but also why it's still fundamentally flawed.

Re: Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code

#320

Post by unknownfuture »

Retr0id wrote: post #170
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 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…

> 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

... plan mode?

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