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Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

tachyon.so

81–90 of 108 posts

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI bot wouldn’t be representing you any more than your text editor would be. You would be using an AI bot to create a lot of text. An AI bot can’t be held accountable, so isn’t able to be a responsibility-absorbing entity. The responsibility automatically falls through to the person running it.

True. But it can help me create a lot of useful text so I can represent my self better. I do wonder what happens when everyone is using agents for this, though. If AI produces the text and AI also reads the text, then do we even need the intermediary at all?

> do wonder what happens when everyone is using agents for this, though.

The company is going to use AI agents to read and respond too. Some botocalypse is going to happen at some point.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#82
post #70

Crazy to read about the Solana AI agent transferring $450K to some random person on Twitter. What was even more shocking was the nonchalant tone in which all of this was detailed in the post.

I mean, the author obviously was filthy rich if he gave the agent a wallet with $50k to fuck around with. The agent didn't lose him $450k, that was just after some Twitter hype made him a fortune that the agent gave away.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#83
post #34
post #12

I’ve said similar in another thread[1]: Sandboxes will be left in 2026. We don't need to reinvent isolated environments; not even the main issue with OpenClaw - literally go deploy it in a VM* on any cloud and you've achieved all same benefits. We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc ——- Unfortuentl…

> We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc At the same time, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of good. If you're piloting an aircraft, yeah, you should have perfection. But if you're sending 34 e-mails and 7 hours of phone calls back and forth to fight a $5500 medical bill that insurance was su…

What if it's convinced to resolve the matter on your behalf, against your favor while it was acting autonomously?

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#84

One promising direction is building abstraction layers to sandbox individual tools, even those that don't have an API already. For example, you could build/vibe code a daemon that takes RPC calls to open Amazon in a browser, search for an item, and add it to your cart. You could even let that be partially "agentic" (e.g. an LLM takes in a list of search results, and selects the one to add to cart). If you let OpenCla…

Honest question: Could you define "agent" in this context?

I like simonw's definition: "An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal."

I guess agent isn't the best term here since the LLM wouldn't be driving the logic in the daemon. Using an LLM to select which item to add to the cart would mimic the behavior of full agentic loop without the risk of it going off the rails and completing the purchase.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#85
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current AI requires a human in the loop for anything non-trivial. Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight. You can vibe-code a standalone repository, but any sort of serious work with real people working alongside bots, every last PR has to be reviewed, moderated, curated, etc. Everything AI does that's not specifically intended to be a standalone, separate project requires tha…

> Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight. s/Even/Especially , I would think. Everyone's idea of how to get any decent performance out of an LLM for coding, entails allowing the code to be run automatically. Nominally so that the LLM can see the results and iterate towards a user-provided goal; but it's still untrusted code.

It's still much easier to verify than to produce, but being willing to do that sort of thing, to enjoy it, or to know how to do it well are very different from loving programming. I think this is where AI butts heads with programmers who are in it for the love of the game.

Getting utility from AI is in the domain of management - the most effective, productive uses I've seen for AI involve elaborate project management scaffolding, hierarchies branching out of an agent.md or some similar setup, with explicit instructions and human oriented breakpoints in the process, so at each stage, the person can look at it all, verify operation of all the subcomponents, accept or reject the PR, and go again.

Normally people just want to vibe their way through a project or process, and that's chaotic specifically because there might be an effectively infinite space of possible legitimate, working completions, but only a tiny finite set of outcomes that could be considered "good". Another much larger but still finite set of "good enough" outcomes end up compounding errors and hitting the user in the face with the mystical salmon of unintended consequences.

Management is all about containing the space of possible outcomes and pushing resources toward a completion that lands in the space of "good", and that's tedious and boring. Even with AI, you're generally working in a space you don't know much about, haven't experienced or learned to enjoy or appreciate anything about it, and don't know enough to correct or guide the AI when it goes off-kilter.

All that to say, we need to automate management so that you can specify a style or methodology at the start and never have to think about it again, and have each AI operate on a strong default that works for lots of use cases. There's really no need to keep the MBAs and c-suite around, what they do is eminently more automatic and methodological than painting or writing poetry. Someone just has to wrangle the right dataset and extract the patterns. Incidentally, this might be one of the only things that gives Microsoft an edge over the next handful of years, since they're riding shotgun and recording everything everyone is doing to get good training data.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#86
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight. s/Even/Especially , I would think. Everyone's idea of how to get any decent performance out of an LLM for coding, entails allowing the code to be run automatically. Nominally so that the LLM can see the results and iterate towards a user-provided goal; but it's still untrusted code.

It's still much easier to verify than to produce, but being willing to do that sort of thing, to enjoy it, or to know how to do it well are very different from loving programming. I think this is where AI butts heads with programmers who are in it for the love of the game. Getting utility from AI is in the domain of management - the most effective, productive uses I've seen for AI involve elaborate project management…

As someone who loves programming, I think the distinction is overstated. Part of the reason why doing what I love is slow, is because I instinctively (try to) verify as I go.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#88
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But it can help me create a lot of useful text so I can represent my self better. I do wonder what happens when everyone is using agents for this, though. If AI produces the text and AI also reads the text, then do we even need the intermediary at all?

> do wonder what happens when everyone is using agents for this, though. The company is going to use AI agents to read and respond too. Some botocalypse is going to happen at some point.

> Some botocalypse is going to happen at some point.

Yeah the bots can duke it out. As long as my time is saved.

For me the main concern is, before I have a stash of millions of dollars saved up, my medical expenses need to be paid for by the system, because I can't afford surprise bills. Hopefully the bots can fight more on my side in the near future.

Hopefully in the far future when the botocalypse happens I'll have saved up enough that insurance evading payment of $5500 won't be an issue for me, and/or I'll be of retirement age, don't need job opportunities anymore, and can go live in a country with better healthcare.

Call me selfish, but I don't control the insurance/medical system, I don't have space to think about more than protecting myself from it.

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#89

I don't think openclaw can possibly be secured given the current paradigm. It has access to your personal stuff (that's its main use case), access to the net, and it gets untrusted third party inputs. That's the unfixable trifecta right there. No amount of filtering band-aid whack-a-mole is going to fix that. Sandboxes are a good measure for things like Claude Code or Amp. I use a bubblewrap wrapper to make sure it c…

And even if you can guarantee it asks permission to do X, LLMs aren't reliable narrators of their own actions

Re: Sandboxes won't save you from OpenClaw

#90
post #83
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc At the same time, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of good. If you're piloting an aircraft, yeah, you should have perfection. But if you're sending 34 e-mails and 7 hours of phone calls back and forth to fight a $5500 medical bill that insurance was su…

What if it's convinced to resolve the matter on your behalf, against your favor while it was acting autonomously?

Prompt it well and this is an unlikely scenario.

I'm concurrently fighting about 5 such things at the same time at any given point in time.

Last week I got a W-2 for a company I didn't work for in 2025.

The week before I got denied FSA coverage for an item despite having a letter of medical necessity.

The week before that I got mis-charged by Doordash, the screen showed $43 and it charged $79 to my card after hitting check out.

I spend a good chunk of my time fighting shit like this. Every week it's some other company abusing power and threatening to take my money.

Even if the bot only succeeds in acting in my favor 4 out of the 5 times it is statistically a good investment of my time.

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