[mazieres]

What would it take for people to stop recklessly running unconstrained AI agents on machines they actually care about? A Stanford researcher thinks the answer is a new lightweight Linux container system that you don't have to configure or think about.

[jillesvangurp]

There always has been this tension between protecting resources and allowing users to access those resources in security. With many systems you have admin/root users and regular users. Some things require root access. Most interesting things (from a security point of view) live in the user directory. Because that's where users spend all their time. It's where you'll find credentials, files with interesting stuff inside, etc. All the stuff that needs protecting.

The whole point of using a computer is being able to use it. For programmers, that means building software. Which until recently meant having a lot of user land tools available ready to be used by the programmer. Now with agents programming on their behalf, they need full access to all that too in order to do the very valuable and useful things they do. Because they end up needing to do the exact same things you'd do manually.

The current security modes in agents are binary. Super anal about absolutely everything; or off. It's a false choice. It's technically your choice to make and waive their liability (which is why they need you to opt in); but the software is frustrating to use unless you make that choice. So, lots of people make that choice. I'm guilty as well. I could approve every ansible and ssh command manually (yes really). But a typical session where codex follows my guardrails to manage one of my environments using ansible scripts it maintains just involves a whole lot such commands. I feel dirty doing it. But it works so well that doing all that stuff manually is not something I want to go back to.

It's of course insecure as hell and I urgently need something better than yolo mode for this. One of the reasons I like codex is that (so far) it's pretty diligent about instruction following and guard rails. It's what makes me feel slightly more relaxed than I perhaps should be. It could be doing a lot of damage. It just doesn't seem to do that.

[vardalab]

unconstrained AI agents are what makes it so useful though. I have been using claude for almost a year now and the biggest unlock was to stop being a worrywart early on and just literally giving it ssh keys and telling it to fix something. ofc I have backups and do run it in VM but in that VM it helps me manage by infra and i have a decent size homelab that would be no fun but a chore without this assistant.

[sersi]

I run my AI agent unconstrained in a VM without access to my local network so it can futz with the system however it wants (so far, I've had to rebuild the VM twice from Claude borking it). That works great for software development.

For devops work, etc (like your use case), I much prefer talking to it and letting it guide me into fixing the issue. Mostly because after that I really understand what the issue was and can fix it myself in the future.

[kristofferR]

Agree, but SSH agents like 1Passwords are nice for that.

You simply tell it to install that Docker image on your NAS like normal, but when it needs to login to SSH it prompts for fingerprint. The agent never gets access to your SSH key.

[bigstrat2003]

> unconstrained AI agents are what makes it so useful though

Not remotely worth it.

[mememememememo]

Yes. It is like walking arounf your house with a flamethrower, but you added fire retardant. Just take the flamethower to a shed you don't mind losing. Which is some kind of cloud workspace most likely. Maybe an old laptop.

Still if you yolo online access and give it cred or access to tools that are authenticated there can still be dragons.

[mazieres]

The problem is that in practice, many people don't take the flamethrower to the shed. I recently had a conversation with someone who was arguing that you don't really need jai because docker works so well. But then it turned out this person regularly runs claude code in yolo mode without a container!

It's like people think that because containers and VMs exist, they are probably going to be using them when a problem happens. But then you are working in your own home directory, you get some compiler error or something that looks like a pain to decipher, and the urge just to fire up claude or codex right then and there to get a quick answer is overwhelming. Empirically, very few people fire up the container at that point, whereas "jai claude" or "jai -D claude" is simple enough to type, and basically works as well as plain claude so you don't have to think about it.

[fouc]

except the big AI companies are pushing stuff designed for people to run on their personal computers, like Claude Cowork.