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by carderne 108 days ago
How do agents tend to deal with getting blocked? Messing around with sandboxes, I've quite even seen them get blocked, assume something is wrong, and go _crazy_ trying to get around the block, never stopping to ask for user input. It might be good to add to the error message: "This is deliberate, don't try to get around it."

For those using pi, I've built something similar[1] that works on macOS+Linux, using sandbox-exec/bubblewrap. Only benefit over OP is that there's some UX for temporarilily/permanently bypassing blocks.

[1] https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox
2 comments
e1g 108 days ago
Claude Code and Codex quickly figure out they are inside sandbox-exec environment. Maybe because they know it internally. Other agents often realize they are being blocked, and I haven't seen them go haywire yet.

Big love for Pi - it was the first integration I added to Safehouse. I wanted something that offers strong guarantees across all agents (I test and write them nonstop), has no dependencies (e.g., the Node runtime), and is easy to customize, so I didn't use the Anthropic sandbox-runtime.

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carderne 108 days ago
Interesting, that's not been my experience! Maybe you've got the list of things to allow/block just right. While testing different policies I've frequently seen Opus 4.6 go absolutely nuts trying to get past a block, unless I made it more clear what was happening.

Yeah I think for general use the transparency of what your thing does is really great compared to a pile of TypeScript and whatnot.

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gbrindisi 108 days ago
ah I also did my own sandbox and at least twice the agent inside tried really hard to go around the firewall, so I ended up intercepting calls to `connect` to return a message that says "Connection refused by the sandbox, don't try to bypass".

Code here: https://github.com/gbrindisi/agentbox

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