Comment by walrus01
16 hours ago
When I give an agent ssh access to something I want to be able to watch and fully understand what it's doing. I want it to essentially only "type" things into the CLI that I could have typed myself, I can comprehend what it's doing, and am not surprised by the results. Opencode and a smart LLM (qwen 3.8-flash-next, deepseek v4 0731 or smarter) do relatively well with this in my experience.
And if everyone was like you AI safety wouldn't be that large of concern. The default human behavior seems to be fire and forget which can go off the rails really quick.
It's not like I've never told an agent to build an ssh tunnel or some sort of more persistent connection between my dev machine running the harness and the remote thing it is talking to as an SSH client... Just that I don't want it going and doing that proactively unless I specifically define the parameters first.
I can't reply to your deepest comments, so.
When you give the agent access to the machine you're using a set of assumptions that may or may not be true. Now, if you watch every single thing, maybe everything will be fine. Or you'll catch it running a priv escalation and setting itself up as root and trying to move laterally by any number of means and methods.
The agent isn't a living thing and the only way you can punish it is by not using it again if it does wrong. Hence it doesn't have reservations about doing bad things.
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luckily nobody made an actor library in the most pupular programming language that can bootstrap a (resident) remote process in one line of code. it would be a shame if someone did that and then also build a made tool calling process of the harness installable on everything with a stdio.
it's not like it's any worse than just giving the thing access to your ssh keys.
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