[CGamesPlay]

> if I start the agent in ./folder then anything outside of ./folder should be off limits unless I explicitly allow it, and the same goes for bash where everything not on an allowlist should be blocked by default.

Here's the problem with Claude Code: it acts like it's got security, but it's the equivalent of a "do not walk on grass" sign. There's no technical restrictions at play, and the agent can (maliciously or accidentally) bypass the "restrictions".

That's why Pi doesn't have restrictions by default. The logic is: no matter what agent you are using, you should be using it in a real sandbox (container, VM, whatever).

[esafak]

But the agent has to interact with the world; fetch docs, push code, fetch comments, etc. You can't sandbox everything. So you push that configuration to your sandbox, which is a worse UX that the harness just asking you at the right time what you'd like to do.

[the_mitsuhiko]

I too would like to know what a good UX looks like here but I have doubts that the permission prompts of Claude are the way to go right now.

Within days people become used to just hitting accept and allowlisting pretty much everything. The agents write length scripts into shell scripts or test runners that themselves can be destructive but they immediately allowlisted.

[CGamesPlay]

Well, you are imagining a worse UX, but it doesn't have to be. Pi doesn't include a sandboxing story at all (Claude provides an advisory but not mandatory one), but the sandbox doesn't have to be a simple static list of allowed domains/files. It's totally valid to make the "push code" tool in the sandbox send a trigger to code running outside of the sandbox, which then surfaces an interactive prompt to you as a user. That would give you the interactivity you want and be secure against accidentally or deliberately bypassing the sandbox.

[esafak]

So you have to set up that integration instead of letting the agent do it. I suppose the sandbox is more configurable, but do you need that? I thought the draw of pi was that you didn't do all that and let it fly, wheeee!

edit: You're not making it sound easy at all. I don't have to build anything with the other agents.

[CGamesPlay]

Certainly not. Pi is "minimalist", so the draw is that it's "easy" to set it up yourself. You can not do that and run it in yolo mode, and you can do that with Claude Code too. Heck you can even use this hypothetical real-sandbox-with-interactive-prompts with Claude Code instead, once you build it.

Back to my original point: Claude Code gives you a false feeling of security, Pi gives you the accurate feeling of not having security.