Comment by everforward
4 days ago
Unless I’m out of the loop, Pi can self modify in the sense that plugins are just code it can edit. It doesn’t live reload that I’m aware of.
Pi’s whole UI is customizable, so a lot of people were having their agents build their own interfaces.
The distinction is probably irrelevant for most people. I secure the whole thing in a container, because I lack the willpower to audit a bajillion lines of LLM code just inside the harness.
See my peer comment for some other thoughts.
What stops your agent from adding a new MCP server on its own? Would you consider that a gap in security posturing?
Pi notably ships without MCP support (or it did, I can't remember if they're adding it to Pi main or just the durable one). From a vanilla Pi perspective, I'm pretty sure but not positive that it can't. It would have to install an MCP plugin, and you would have to re-launch Pi to load that plugin.
It does have native tools, but they're also in plugins that aren't hot-reloaded. The LLM would have to write the tool, you close Pi and re-open it before it was available.
> Would you consider that a gap in security posturing?
Honestly, I think trying to secure the harness is a lost cause for the same reasons SELinux never really took off. They solve a real problem in a way so painful people would rather just live dangerously.
I actually wrote a thing to implement my security posture https://github.com/SethCurry/abyss TLDR it pretends to be an ACP agent, but runs the agent inside Docker (with optional bind mounts) and proxies the ACP connection into the container.
I'm also tinkering with WASM-based plugins in the ACP proxy to add some additional security and compliance posturing at the protocol layer (ie agnostic to what the underlying agent is). E.g. I slapped together a plugin that will automatically cancel a prompt mid-turn if an OpenRouter API token shows up in a) the prompt, b) agent output/thinking, c) agent tool calls. ([1], [2], [3]). The grand vision is slapping centralized management on that so security and compliance teams get a "firewall" of sorts to prevent leaking secrets, filter bash commands, censor PII, yada, yada.
1. Screenshot of it blocking something in Zed https://abyss.scurry.io/docs/guides/what-is-abyss/#i-am-not-... (I need to add buffering so it doesn't output any of the key)
2. Implementation of ^ https://github.com/SethCurry/abyss/blob/main/plugins/secrets...
3. Plugin architecture docs https://abyss.scurry.io/docs/guides/04-plugins/02-developing...
Hey, I agree that trying to secure the harness with bubblewrap or other case-by-case limitations is inherently unsatisfactory, and I also wrote an open-source agent container tool (on top of gVisor + Kubernetes, since it can run pretty much anywhere at the cost of some performance). In case you're interested, I'd love your feedback, and obviously feel free to take any pieces that are helpful. The transparent egress proxy in particular was a pain to figure out: https://yaac.dev/
6 replies →
Pi ships with MCP support
https://pi.dev/docs/latest/mcp
I'm using a number of @gotgene's plugins, they are really nice
I'm looking at porting my Dagger based env to Pi, mainly because it allows me to fork / time-travel the complete environment. One thing I really like about Pi is that /tree command and friends. It aligns really well with how container layer based env can be realized with the Dagger SDK.