What would a better system look like?

Agents should make better use of OS sandboxing facilities with finer-grained ACLs.

Less: Do you want to run "npm run build"?

More: "npm run build" tried to read your Chrome cookie database, do you want to allow that?

Some agents like Codex use sandboxing on Linux/MacOS but the permissions are far too coarse - they'll run the command in a relatively strict sandbox and when it fails they'll ask you to allowlist the command as a whole, forever. There should be a new permission prompt every time a command tries to do something new.

Claude suggests (or used to suggest - it's been a while) to allowlist "bash" which completely defeats the point. If you do that the agent can run `bash -c "echo literally anything"`

Not using agents at all. It could edit your code to do something malicious when you run it. Not even once. Not even if the agent has a gun to your head.

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