Comment by AdieuToLogic
1 month ago
>> I'm not surprised to see these horror stories
> I am! To the point that I don’t believe it!
> You’re running an agentic AI and can parse through logs, but you can’t sandbox or back up?
When best practices for using a tool involves sandboxing and/or backing up before each use in order to minimize the blast radius of using same, it begs the question; why use it knowing there is a nontrivial probability one will have to recover from it's use any number of times?
> Like, I’ve given Copilot permission to fuck with my admin panel. It promptly proceeded to bill thousands of dollars ... But support immediately refunded everything. I had backups.
And what about situations where Claude/Copilot/etc. use were not so easily proven to be at fault and/or their impacts were not reversible by restoring from backups?
> why use it knowing there is a nontrivial probability one will have to recover from it's use any number of times?
Because the benefits are worth the risk. (Even if the benefit is solely sating curiosity.)
I’m not defending this case. I’m just saying that every one of us has rm -r’d or rm*’d something, and we did it because we knew it saved time most of the time and was recoverable otherwise.
Where I’m sceptical is that someone who can use the tool is also being ruined by a drive wipe. It reads like well-targeted outrage pork.
>> why use it knowing there is a nontrivial probability one will have to recover from it's use any number of times?
> Because the benefits are worth the risk. (Even if the benefit is solely sating curiosity.)
Understood. I personally disagree with this particular risk assessment, but completely respect personal curiosity and your choices FWIW.
> I’m not defending this case. I’m just saying that every one of us has rm -r’d or rm*’d something, and we did it because we knew it saved time most of the time and was recoverable otherwise.
And we then recognized it as a mistake when it was one (such as `rm -fr ~/`).
IMHO, the difference here is giving agency to a third-party actor known to generate arbitrary file I/O commands. And thus in order to localize its actions to what is intended and not demand perfect vigilance, having to make sure Claude/Copilot/etc. has a diaper on so that cleanup is fairly easy.
My point is - why use a tool when you know it will poop all over itself sooner or later?
> Where I’m sceptical is that someone who can use the tool is also being ruined by a drive wipe. It reads like well-targeted outrage pork.
Good point. Especially when the machine was a Mac, since Time Machine is trivial to enable.
EDIT:
Here's another way to think about Claude and friends.
How many times would it take for a person getting punched in the face before they ask themself before entering the burger place if they will get punched this time?