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Comment by robeym | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really get the logic behind letting agents run with full access to anything important. On one end you’ve got fully sandboxed setups where they can barely do anything useful, and where the user is scared to let it read files, and on the other end people are just pointing them at production systems and hoping for the best.

It's great to get excited about new tools, but learning how to use a tool before diving in is foundational.

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Yeah totally relate to this. I’ve been talking to developers and engineers (~60 in total since last month). Most of them are just running YOLO without any security or safeguards while knowing that it’s dangerous.

One guy who works at a coding agent company just casually mentioned that we ask users consent that it can do damage and don’t apply any sandbox. Listening to this was mind boggling for me.

PS: we’re interviewing people as a part of user research for our sandbox product.

yeah it is foundational, but that is not going to happen. Even if you learn how to use it, there have to be guardrails set by the org/ tech. Kind of always thinking that the user will fail.

Agreed. I wonder if large companies are already deciding on which tool to use based on guardrails. I'm seeing a lot of Copilot, but that's probably because of deep M365 roots they might've already had, rather than it being chosen for being reliably safe.

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