Hacker News Reader

Comment by VCFundedGenYer | Hacker News Reader

Regular reminder to never download/install AI chatbot apps - they all work in a browser where they can be isolated.

Do not let these things loose on your computer.

I find a lot of people take a very backward approach to agents: They adopt desktop versions with full access first, and only later discover sandboxes and cloud environments.

Claude and ChatGPT both come with free cloud sandboxes that work great! If they are just writing code there's little reason to hand over your laptop.

Not everyone programs nuclear reactors.

If you have a business account where client requests come in over GMail/Slack and you just do web design/payment integration or some such, go wild.

If you have a corporate codebase and access to prod, as well as family photos, well — different beast.

>free cloud sandboxes

Can't speak to Claude, but the OpenAI cloud environments cost you something like 3x token usage last I looked into it.

For e2e testing?

At work we have rather strict rules for how to run AI agents, and for good reasons apparently. The problem is that once these rules are in place and enforced, using an agent is just more hassle that I feel it's worth. The agents work in complete isolation in a VM with access to pretty much nothing. Some colleagues are making good use of them, but just looking at the policies and tooling we have put in place makes me give up in advance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com