Yesterday I with help from the clanker, as an experiment, ported a web app from go+postgres+svelte to ari+duckdb+htmx served locally by busybox httpd. It’s an analytics “dashboard” so the stack makes sense. So far looks good. Now I work on the code in vim to make it mine. I want fewer layers of abstraction and less complexity, and this is a learning experience to that end.
Any conversation
The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding.
Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself.
We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.
... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox.
So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able.
My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.
This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit.
I also don't want the agent to be able to
git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long.
There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out.
At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.
Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?
It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on.
For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).
Finally merged the jetpack PR in hallucinate.site — now you can fly around!
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creative technologist
creator of textlog:
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creator of textlog:This all is superduper impressive!
A lot of people write so much software to sandbox their AI agents.
I say don't bother. Just give your agent its own non-admin local user account. It's easier and much more effective.
I give my AI Full-Access. :p
My whole machine is set up to make way too much easily accessible with shell tools (email, stock trading, payments, mms group chats.) I can't trust it.
Vår konges livsgjerning går mot slutten, landet samler seg for å ta farvel med en konge som har vært samlende og god for landet. Må Gud velsigne hans minne og hans etterfølger.
Our king's life's work is coming to an end, the country comes together to say goodbye to a king who has been unifying and good for the country. May God bless his memory and his successor.