> There's no way to properly block them with just allow- and block lists

Especially not when some harnesses rely on the reliability of the LLM to determine what's allowed or not, pretty much "You shouldn't do thing X" and then asking the LLM to itself evaluate if it should be able to do it or not when it comes up. Bananas.

Only right and productive way to run an agent on your computer is by isolating it properly somehow then running it with "--sandbox danger-full-access --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox" or whatever, I myself use docker containers, but there are lots of solutions out there.

You have to be extremely careful when you set up a dev container, lock down file access, do not give the agent the power to start other containers or "docker compose up", restrict network access to an allow-list etc. Just running the agent in a container does little to protect you. (Maybe you know this, but a lot of people don't!)

Most of those things are what happens by default. Sure, be careful, but by default it's secure enough to prevent most potential issues. No need to lock down file access for example, by default it only has access to files inside the container, and of course by default containers don't have access to start other containers, and so on.

Good word of caution though, make sure you actually isolate when you set out to isolate something :)

I've just discovered and started using smolmachines^1 which actually have the requisite isolation.

1. https://smolmachines.com

As mentioned, "podman/docker run -it $my-image codex" also actually has the requisite isolation by default, no need for special software. Biggest risk is accidental deletion of stuff, easily solved without running an entire VM, which "smol" machines seems to be. No doubt VMs have their uses too, but for simple isolation like this I personally rather use already existing tooling.