But, it's still running on my desktop/laptop. I don't trust them to run on my machine. But, I guess I could run one VM with a desktop to contain the desktop app. Or, just keep using CLI agents.
For local tasks you can only give agents delegated that execute your deterministic read or write on an allowed set of files(e.g pi does this) and execute rights only on containers with no network access. That should get you 95% unblocked for most tasks you want to do with an LLM pretty safely.
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
Is the trust concern for the agent running in any form on your machine? Like in a VM on your machine as well or do you mean on the host itself?
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I don't run agents directly on my desktop/laptop machine. I run them in VMs or containers (sometimes in containers on VMs). There have been too many credentials stealing exploits via prompt injection and the like for me to be willing to let an agent roam around on my personal system.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
> The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
You might want to check out Ant's open source srt [0], I use it to contain my local coding agents. It's strict by default and enforced at the OS layer.
What benefit does running it locally have over parents solution of running it in a container in a VM?
I do the same: my agents run in a hardened VM on a hardened Linux machines in a separated network in my basement. The magic of ssh makes this setup transparent for me on my desktop. But extremely hard for my agent to do nasty things.
I'm working on a credential broker that would keep credentials vaulted and parcel out access on a per-grant basis. Is that something you'd find useful or is your setup comprehensive enough? We would be allowing people to draft access policies with natural language, I figured it would be useful for things like vercel, stripe access etc.
Not at all would i ever within the current technology constraints trust a "natural language model" to secure access to my own credentials, i will always keep it as completely isolated from anything at all i would consider 'risky' and pre-define before it begins what it could possibly access through a brand new VM with only the absolute minimal access to any git repo's and completely restrict to the extent that is allowable, it's ability to do anything outside of it's own playground. The playground is disposable, the potential for the LLM to access any of my own accounts and wreak havoc on the trust in my network is unacceptable under any rules....
fwiw, i built something simple like this into my harness thing (github.com/0gsd/enough). may not be complicated enough to do per application nowadays vs. needing a modularized outside solution, but it is certainly a good idea that seems to work!
Oh yeah, that sounds wise to me. Some people don't run the agents on a VM on their own machine and opt for a VPS somewhere. And I was wondering if privacy and security had anything to do with their decision.
It's all fun and games until the model is smart enough to figure out privilege escalation, i.e. a lot of people don't realize Docker enabled on a regular user is enough for privilege escalation if you "follow the tutorials."
When I was in university in 2009, the student union I was in had set up their Linux computers with a small program that one of the members wrote, that had the suid bit set and would exec apt-get install passing the arguments along.
This way, all members of the student union were able to install any software they wanted to on the student union computers without having to give out blanket root access to the members. Only a select few members had full root access.
There’s other ways to achieve the same too.
And you can do this exact same sort of thing for the user that your agent runs as too, without having to give it access to do everything that root can.
I mean, if the execution happen on the VM then the problem is trust on the programs and then you can't trust any program by that logic? That or you think AI-companies software is serious slop.
I do, in fact, think the AI companies software is serious slop. I've read some of the Claude Code source.
And, we're not talking about hypothetical attacks here. Prompt injection attacks have happened. Supply chain attacks that agents fell for have happened.
I don't run anything but the agent and the project it's working on and the tools it needs to work on the project in the VM.
You can't see how the agent having no access to anything other than what it's working on is safer than the agent having access to my home directory with all of my credentials?
Look, you do whatever you want to do with your agents and your computer. I'm going to...contain them.
Seriously, you dont see any difference? A agent is non deterministic and may delete or change you data as a normal matter of operations. A browser, barring bugs or security issues, would not delete or modify the data you have outside the browser.
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all