With e.g. VM or container sandboxing, we can say things like "If there are no vulnerabilities in the hypervisor or hardware, then the agent can only access these files, these network services, etc". Auto mode doesn't even try to provide any guarantees, so it's impossible to reason about. It amounts to just using the models judgment about what's "malicious" or not, a definition which is subjective, changes model to model, and can be influenced by attacker input.

Empirical evaluations of how many vulnerabilities manual vs auto mode let through are not super meaningful because auto mode changes dramatically with model releases, the type of task being performed, whether the attacker is making targeted attacks designed to bypass auto mode, etc. A security feature cannot rely on these sorts of factors if it's to be taken seriously.

Further, percent of malicious tool calls accepted is a bad metric. It's like measuring the security of ssh in terms of what percent of unauthenticated logins succeed. The only acceptable value is zero. It's pass/fail, not a spectrum. So both auto and manual mode should fail equally here. Further, the set of malicious tool calls admitted in auto mode may not be a subset of those admitted in manual mode.

But this is the downside. It might be fine 99% of the time, but 1% of the time you get a critical secret published to GitHub, even after human review.

Is this even worse than what us humans did on our own before LLMs? I’m not sure. It’s not like secrets never got accidentally committed before, it just illustrates the new paradigm we’re working in.

Either you let your agents run wild, and you cross your fingers that they don’t do anything bad, or you need to accept that your new job is to be an agent babysitter, and audit every command.

Many of the problems when it comes to the manual approval feel like they stem from the expectation of using auto mode in the first place. After all, what's the point of improving the manual approval and safety matching if auto mode is the end all be all, and what's the point of training the model to output commands in a manner that can be parsed by a human if auto mode is always meant to be used? It's very rare for me to not see "command could not be statically analyzed", because the model keeps outputting bash golf.

Dumb if you don’t turn on auto-mode, dumb if auto-mode commits .claude.

No way to hold it right I guess?

If it's keys or secrets of any kind, you're even dumber.

If it's in a hidden directory, you are even dumber still.

If you rely on somebody stupid enough to do any of that not to commit it, you have gone beyond the valley of the ultra-dumb. Actually that's true even if you rely on smart people not to do it.

You got your dumb card fully punched when you created `.keys` to begin with.

But even that wouldn't be enough because LLMs are nondeterministic, and these kinds of issues are the inevitable results.

Only a mechanical, deterministic failsafe can protect you from it.

If the command is explained, and then we get a chance to edit it, maybe make the rm -rf into a mv; give us UI to edit the filter being applied. I have no problem hitting "Always allow" so claude can run "git status --flags a/b/c/filename" but as a human, I'd like to be able to edit the permission blanket to be "git status *.

Which I can do manually specify in the config file, but that's annoying. I'm fully capable of opening my terminal app and editing that in vim, but I'd rather not have to. It's like this for every project too. If I start fresh on a new machine, new Claude account, how much do I need to redo?

I ended up having to build a full shell argument decomposition and parser, with it I can manage allow list of rich tree structured commands. Centralizing a curated collection of known command structures and their side effects would help a lot. I don't know if Claude does this already, but it doesn't work with things like `gcloud` from my experience, and that has resulted in it slurping secrets (even a partial read I've had to rotate keys for).

Claude uses bigquery in the command line by piping sql files from /tmp into the `bq` command. I had Claude create a hook that expands the SQL file into the permission prompt giving me a real chance to review these, but the TUI truncates long commands with no scroll option. Making that the default behaviour and adding a pager would allow better review of lots of executable scripts.

As long Claude is running as the user's account there's no guarantees. An approach like 1password's `op read` to physically separate secrets from repo read access and printing would he helpful (as in, make sure that no standard key formats can be ingested into the agent's context or logging).

Again, I don't know if any of these are implemented, they've very likely to have been tried by the Claude team, but maybe there's a long shot chance that it helps.

What if the 'settings' being described here aren't 'project settings' they're 'personal settings for the project'.

I imagine we're following dev ecosystem conventions where everybody puts their tool settings in the project folder so they know where to find it and can share it; but are agent directives like this closer to a 'tool', or closer to a 'contributor'?

If the latter, I wouldn't expect to see "Joe's personal list of naughty and nice commands" in my project files either, certainly not under 'settings'. So just don't put them there.

$Trillion AI company asking for ideas from the community whose work they hoovered up to make money, ruin an entire industry and make lifetimes of hard earned skill completely valueless in the span of 2 years.

Along with how Claude checks it in.

I frequently hit stop on and auto mode task to prevent it from completely flooding my context with some completely unrelated garbage.

Claude really should push away tasks that end up needing more exploration in worker contexts. That way the workers can maintain a sensible amount of context without pushing the main chat into the dumb region.

If we've already crossed the bridge to being confident in a non-deterministic reviewer for auto-mode, then, I see no obvious reason as to why we couldn't have the proposed rules be generated by a model. If that were reality, then- all rules placed in settings.local could be secretless, with the confidence of whatever model we tell 'make sure the rule does not contain secret material, consider its destination as potentially public'.

[1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permissions#wildcard-pattern... AFAICT, CC will either save off a prefix+wildcard rule, or exact command. Sounds like the former is likely not the cause of the problem here.