> I am! To the point that I don’t believe it!
> You’re running an agentic AI and can parse through logs, but you can’t sandbox or back up?
When best practices for using a tool involves sandboxing and/or backing up before each use in order to minimize the blast radius of using same, it begs the question; why use it knowing there is a nontrivial probability one will have to recover from it's use any number of times?
> Like, I’ve given Copilot permission to fuck with my admin panel. It promptly proceeded to bill thousands of dollars ... But support immediately refunded everything. I had backups.
And what about situations where Claude/Copilot/etc. use were not so easily proven to be at fault and/or their impacts were not reversible by restoring from backups?
Because the benefits are worth the risk. (Even if the benefit is solely sating curiosity.)
I’m not defending this case. I’m just saying that every one of us has rm -r’d or rm*’d something, and we did it because we knew it saved time most of the time and was recoverable otherwise.
Where I’m sceptical is that someone who can use the tool is also being ruined by a drive wipe. It reads like well-targeted outrage pork.
> Because the benefits are worth the risk. (Even if the benefit is solely sating curiosity.)
Understood. I personally disagree with this particular risk assessment, but completely respect personal curiosity and your choices FWIW.
> I’m not defending this case. I’m just saying that every one of us has rm -r’d or rm*’d something, and we did it because we knew it saved time most of the time and was recoverable otherwise.
And we then recognized it as a mistake when it was one (such as `rm -fr ~/`).
IMHO, the difference here is giving agency to a third-party actor known to generate arbitrary file I/O commands. And thus in order to localize its actions to what is intended and not demand perfect vigilance, having to make sure Claude/Copilot/etc. has a diaper on so that cleanup is fairly easy.
My point is - why use a tool when you know it will poop all over itself sooner or later?
> Where I’m sceptical is that someone who can use the tool is also being ruined by a drive wipe. It reads like well-targeted outrage pork.
Good point. Especially when the machine was a Mac, since Time Machine is trivial to enable.
EDIT:
Here's another way to think about Claude and friends.
Suppose a person likes hamburgers and there
was a burger place which made free hamburgers
to order 95% of the time. The burgers might
not have exactly the requested toppings, but
were close enough.
The other 5% of the time the customer is punched
in the face repeatedly.
I noticed the nonsense due to an alert that my OneDrive was over limit, which caught my attention, since I don’t use OneDrive.
If I prompted a half-decent LLM to run up billables, I doubt I could have done a better job.
I like Kagi’s Research agent.
Personally, I was curious about a technology and ready for amusement. I also had local backups. So my give a shit factor was reduced.
Sounds like really throwing caution to the wind here...
Having backups would be the least of my worries about something that
"promptly proceeded to bill thousands of dollars, drawing heat maps of the density of built structures in Milwaukee; buying subscriptions to SAP Joule and ArcGIS for Teams; and generating terabytes of nonsense maps, ballistic paths and “architectural sketch[es] of a massive bird cage the size of Milpitas, California (approximately 13 square miles)” resembling “a futuristic aviary city with large domes, interconnected sky bridges, perches, and naturalistic environments like forests, lakes, and cliffs inside.”
It could just as well do something illegal, expose your personal data, create non-refundable billables, and many other very shitty situations...
I am! To the point that I don’t believe it!
You’re running an agentic AI and can parse through logs, but you can’t sandbox or back up?
Like, I’ve given Copilot permission to fuck with my admin panel. It promptly proceeded to bill thousands of dollars, drawing heat maps of the density of built structures in Milwaukee; buying subscriptions to SAP Joule and ArcGIS for Teams; and generating terabytes of nonsense maps, ballistic paths and “architectural sketch[es] of a massive bird cage the size of Milpitas, California (approximately 13 square miles)” resembling “a futuristic aviary city with large domes, interconnected sky bridges, perches, and naturalistic environments like forests, lakes, and cliffs inside.”
But support immediately refunded everything. I had backups. And it wound up hilarious albeit irritating.