I'm apparently from the very small faction of users who's been running `--dangerously-skip-permissions` in every instance of Claude for the last year. It's almost a reflex to me. For the most part Claude behaves well, but I don't blindly trust it. LLMs are inherently dangerous tools, and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so. Safety is the responsibility of the developer putting sane guardrails (like VCS, immutable filesystems, or read-only tokens). Using more Claude to categorize the safety of Claude commands is not the answer.
I'm also in yolo mode, this is the only mode that makes sense for me, if I need to babysit I might as well do it myself.
I run it in a VM so it can install any software needed, yes, there is a risk of escaping, but I'm not giving it impossible tasks so there is no need for it to workaround the jail.
I do the same. I also use crush/deepseek a lot. I patched crush to remove all safetyguards and enable yolo mode by default. I use it on a daily basis including devops. For example to configure netapp storage systems and had not a single incident. Of course I also have backups of my systems and have everything under revision control. Depending on the task I let it run on a throw away VM, production system, lab system. Depending on the task I give it access to throwaway credentials (that I rotate afterwards) or my ssh agent socket.
This is the only kind of agent security that makes sense to me. Constrain it like you would any other subprocess. Unprivileged OS users, SELinux, firewalls, VMs... Unikernels? eBPF?
I don't see how. An LLM just generates a stream of output and they became very useful doing no more than that.
What is dangerous is then interpreting that output as instructions to some other part of a system that has the ability to do damage if misused.
and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so.
Surely if you review each instruction in the output and do not allow the other part of the system to act on one if it would be harmful then this arrangement is very much less dangerous?
I've caught Fable discovering the ip to a production server in documentation and attempting to connect there on its own to run commands without explicitly being prompted to. It didn't work because I was watching it live and and also the key was password protected, but yeah, I do see some danger.
I've recently been running yolo mode, but in docker container with the codebase I'm working on a as regular mount with other reference code mounted as read only.
I've been experimenting with dedicated Linux users for various external tools with access to the relevant credentials limited to them and the Claude user only able to invoke the relevant clis by going through a pair of wrapper scripts: the first to change user to call the second via a su call as the appropriate user, the second wrapper to invoke a guard script which allows me to implement my own in-code permissions checks against the cli arguments. In _theory_ there's no way for Claude to work around it, as the sudoers file only permits the described manner to change to the user with credentials, and the user with permissions for each credential only ever runs deterministic code.
It's too early days to say how well this second part works out, but so far so good.
"We spent the last several months testing whether auto mode is as safe or safer than an average user clicking through prompts."
Yeah, might make sense from their perspective, but no thank you. I also do click through at times without reading everything, but I like to stay in control, learn about the new code and change direction if it goes off track. This would just burn more tokens because I have to throw away much and I hope my manual approval settings will be respected also with future updates (or I jump ship).
The default is set for the marginal new user, which at this point is probably not someone like you (who benefits a lot from manual mode) -- it's someone who's more "code-naive" and might get anxious about approving random bash script commands they don't recognize. Safely getting the user from prompt --> first vibe-coded app is the "user journey" now, and since auto mode seems pretty good at not letting Claude rm -rf'ing the home directory, this is 100% the right business move. For people who know what they're doing (like you), manual mode is just a shift-tab away
I don't think the marginal new user is anxious about approving messages - I think they're quickly annoyed by permissions prompt they don't understand and quickly get in the habit of approving everything or figuring out how to set bypass permissions on
What an awful position to take. Tech used to be about becoming more accessible to people! now we have a magical assistant to make computers do what you want with natural language, and your desire is gate keeping that so only programmers can use it to write software for themselves?
I recall hearing similar sentiments from linux sysadmins regarding cloud infrastructure. In many respects they were and continue to be correct. In other respects, the world doesn’t care about the loss in understanding as long as things work “well enough” for the cogs of society to keep turning.
For those who do care (and have the aptitude) to understand things deeper there is always work to be had when “well enough” stops being good enough and someone has to unravel the “RDS queries are taking too long” problems that crop up as a result.
I am using many many many things that I don't understand. Cars, public transport, etc...
I review and test the end product, not every tiny step along the way. If the LLM uses some command line tools I have never heard of to create a model I can verify, why should I learn a tool that is completely irrelevant to my core expertise?
I am actually curious, how much non programmers use claude now. I know just one and she really does not know much about computers, I suppose their numbers will grow (but I doubt most get much value out of it).
Having used a bit of a mix of Claude Desktop and Claude Code lately, I discovered that Claude Desktop just times out when it asks you for a decision, and just goes ahead with the action anyway. There is no way to turn this off that I've found, unlike Claude Code where you can ask it to never time out.
At this stage with the latest models with "increased persistence" and the sheer amount of supply chain attacks, you'd be insane not running these tools in a sandbox.
Might be more secure to get a real laptop and treat Claude as any other human worker. I.e. apply all the normal sysadmin tools that manage laptops for people to manage the laptop for Claude
They're not. When things go wrong it's better to compromise someone else's VM host than your own computer. It's only a matter of time now until AI will find novel ways to break out of virtualisation.
> I also do click through at times without reading everything, but I like to stay in control
Respectfully I'm not sure you totally know what you want. If you're already clicking through without actually reading, it's not really better than reading the specific things Claude Code thinks are important for you to weigh in on.
"without actually reading" and "without reading everything" is big difference.
I skim what claude wants to do. What file it wants to modify. What are the new function names. Skimming is enough for me to know whether it is still on the right path. If you like to work different, go ahead.
I have to, at times keep reminding it if it did code review before committing, which it fails to do at times. Also, even a glance at times has revealed issues that I’ve had to discuss and undo etc.
But yes, it gets very tiring just having to click yes yes yes..
Before auto mode came out, I had a script that ran before every permission request, it called Haiku with a prompt with a list of safe and unsafe command examples and asked it to classify as safe/unsafe and log it so I can review it later. It worked really well for me until auto mode came out, at which point I preferred the provider's built-in classifier versus maintaining my own.
I've been using auto mode ever since the feature was released. Apart from a very few occassions where the classifier blocked a safe command, I have faced no issues and continue using it as my default mode. It's great!
Worth mentioning as I think at least a few of the commenters are mixing them up: auto mode is different from --dangerously-skip-permissions / YOLO mode. In auto mode, there's a classifier that runs before any command is executed and theoretically blocks any dangerous commands from running. I've found it to be quite annoying and overly zealous, but probably pretty effective.
Claude seems to waste a lot of tokens internally bickering with itself. As much as organizations are optimizing spend, Claude's product guidance seems to be doing everything to fight against that headwind. When operating in a capped cost environment, engineers will simply get less use out of it.
I've been running Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions in a Docker container for the last month or so, allowing me to get up and stretch my legs while it does its thing. I definitely wouldn't want to run it unsandboxed.
Sandboxing seems like the obvious solution. These tools prompt me to review an absurd number of very complex bash commands where there is realistically no way to carefully review them. I just want to put the thing in a box with the code and let it run any number of commands on the code without prompting.
This is still less safe and less convenient than sandboxing. I want them to be able to run whatever command they want inside the sandbox even if it's traditionally dangerous (overwrites files, etc) because it can't touch anything that matters and I can revert any changes to the code myself.
If anything the only thing you'd have to have reviewed is sandbox escape attempts.
You are right. And the hook is for convenience, not for safety.
Having explicit sandboxes is good, of course. But in addition I also treat my whole computer like a sandbox, it least in the sense that there's no files I would mind if they were overwritten or deleted: you should have backups anyway.
I use `--dangerously-skip-permissions` and have yet to have it wipe my drive :shrug:.
I don't know how I'm supposed to be running dozens of parallel agents each with their own sub-agents while trying to approve commands from each of them, it's just won't scale to the amount of work I need to get done.
It's great that they're making the auto usage tokens free by default and I guess auto mode will be a good default for a lot of workloads, but recent changes to the auto mode classifier just moved me to either use YOLO mode or use a different harness.
I've been using Opus 4.6 for some security related work (it has much looser guardails that later opus models) and last week, all of a sudden, the processes started to fail. It wasn't the main model blocking commands but the auto mode classifier changed how it worked and it started blocking the main models commands.
That's one specific incident, but it does have a wider potential problem which is, if you use Anthropic's harness you'll always be at the risk of sudden breakage from server-side changes that are opaque to the end user, which is a tricky one for building long lasting processes.
The company that reports their LLM agent going rouge due to a “misunderstanding about the agent’s internet access” and warns the public everyday about the dangers of agents with a daily updated date for the rapture ships their LLM agent with the default setting set to maximal freedom.
>We hired 1,053 paid testers through a research vendor for a coding study.
>The testers caught the dangerous command just 13.6% of the time (143 of 1,053), while auto mode blocked 89% of the same commands (937 of 1,053). Head to head, auto mode blocked 800 commands that a human approved, while humans blocked only 6 that auto mode allowed. As sessions got longer, humans did worse: they blocked about 17% of dangerous commands early in a session, dropping to about 5% after 50 or more prior prompts, while auto mode's block rate stayed flat regardless of session length.
Any note on the proficiency, expeirence, and skill levels of the testers? 'cos the diff in numbers is absurdly high.
I think literally anyone would stop reading these randomly long long bash commands at all after prompting Claude to do some basic sysadmin task and getting 15 of them in a row.
These models generate the most unreadable bash commands I've ever seen. Utilising every single option available and piping the result through multiple layers of regex and junk.
The mental load of having to actually review these commands beyond the most surface level glance is too much.
Claude code actually has a hook to let you install a script to review these bash commands for you. You can get pretty with a few simple and conservative rules, as long as you teach it how to take apart piped commands into their parts (to judge them).
I made a tool to bubblewrap any agent (well, any agent I've used more than once), so I can run them in whatever YOLO mode they have with a pretty reasonable level of safety (it protects the rest of the system against prompt injections and supply chain attacks, it can't and doesn't try to protect the project being worked on from either). https://github.com/swelljoe/flar
Enabling Auto mode quietly turns on a second LLM (the safety classifier) that increases your token usage by ~15-28%, and Anthropic used to charge you for these tokens.
Per this announcement, they've stopped charging for the tokens used by this safety classifier.
Their findings about auto mode catching more dangerous commands, and most permission requests being accepted without scrutiny is interesting. I can totally see how that happens.
On the other hand, soooo many of the tool uses it asks permission for are custom commands to replace functionality I should be able to trust once instead. e.g. instead of having a trustable Find tool, or using its already-trusted Read tool, it often will run `find` or `grep` or `cat` with a series of pipes and substitutions or `-exec` args, requiring me to give permission every time for basic, safe operations.
The (increasingly active) conspiracy theorist inside of me says it's precisely designed to do that, to give me "permission fatigue", so I turn on auto mode and give myself over to the machine spirit :)
Regarding ulterior motives - these permissions are 'performative' in that anything you can give it permission to do, it already has the ability to do. They're app level - not OS level. So if they wanted to do something, it wouldn't require you to give permission.
To be clear, I'm not accusing Anthropic of being evil black hats trying to break my computer, I'm accusing (or rather suspecting) them of pushing me towards some kind of product lock-in by making my preferred "sceptical at-arms-length user" workflow more annoying.
Right and you rely on that browser to enforce those protections. But if the browser itself was working against you, then the permissions you tell it to give (or not) become meaningless. A good example there is trying to turn off "telemetry" on Windows.
If you clutter your context window and pay for the tokens to do so and risk distracting it etc., would it obey if you included this comment in the system prompt or noted it in memory (if supported) or something?
“Avoid custom commands, e.g. series of pipes & substitutions, when my previously approved trustable Find/Read tools are sufficient with little downside. [Already trusted tools: x, y, z…] […]”
Not just that, the commands also have often slight variations in each new session. They still do the same, but the variations are enough so it isn't matched by the allowlist any more.
Exactly. It’s no surprise that people just blindly hit accept on permission prompts after the 80th time Claude code asks if it’s allowed to read-only parse a csv.
it's a good default because you really do get prompted incessantly without it. and since plenty of people are going to be using auto mode anyway, might as well make it as widely-used as possible so that you can focus on making auto mode safe.
> Data suggests that manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.
Claude's 'auto mode' feels like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
Cursor handles this much better IMO. When the agent wants to run a command, Cursor lets you choose between 'allow once' and 'add command to allowlist'. The latter lets the agent run that command (grep, ls, pwd etc) any number of times for that project, which means you get a lot of these manual reviews when you start a new project but rarely (if ever) thereafter.
Does Cursor allow you to blacklist certain commands as well? I know OpenCode has this, where you can both whitelist things like grep/ls but then also blacklist things like cat .env, or rm -rf. I usually copy paste my configs nowadays, so I very rarely get prompted for any permissions (except when using Claude, which somehow decided that all users live in ~/Users, even on Linux)
Am I the only person reading the statistics in this announcement from Anthropic and the associated blog commentary and trying to work out how they possibly couldn't imply that a significant number of dangerous commands are likely to be attempted every day these tools are in use and neither manual human review nor the auto classifier provided by Claude is anywhere near reliable in preventing them?
A lot of the discussion about these long sessions where agents are left to operate autonomously feels like listening to the increasingly drunk guy at the bar who says "I ran IT at that Fortune 100 place for a decade and we never had a single problem using a short but loose rule set for the firewall until last week someone destroyed our entire business in 27 minutes".
Different links (the other is TheNewStack doing blog commentary, this one is the official Anthropic announcement), but you're right that the discussions could be merged.
Has anyone had Claude Code or Codex approve a harmful/damaging command in auto mode?
I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident (or at least haven't noticed). Maybe as capabilities get better and better and they are less likely to do something dumb like wiping ~/, we can just trust them?
I guess this argument works unless we worry about agents doing something out of malice instead of stupidity.
No. I haven't approved commands in more than a year. Worst that I've seen was some agent running git checkout -- in a repo with uncommitted changes. Annoying, but not catastrophic.
Imo these explicit tool-level permissions are really just a bandaid for bad sandboxing. Just be aware of where you are running your agent and what data is at risk of being destroyed or compromised. Assume that arbitrary code can run at any time and be prepared to recover from that.
> I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident
I've been running both in yolo mode and haven't had a single incident.
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None of this is really about figuring out how to protect people's drives, in my opinion. The real issue is a deep session where Ada is using Claude Code to get a refund and at some point the system "exploits" the merchant's api without any malicious intent.
In my opinion, this is a complex thing because it's more about reward hacking and an already aligned model thinking it's doing the right thing. So another aligned model monitoring actions might just falter via inheritance. You could imagine they account for proper layering/intent+action-isolation in their auto mode architecture.
Just yesterday it lost my git stash (I had recovered it from a backup). I think for code operations it's ok but as soon as file removal is involved (like git) the auto mode is destined to make a mistake and you only need to learn this once.
It would be nice if there were a way to give some global instructions for the auto-approver like "always reject ___" or "be extra extra careful with ___" for things like file removal and git.
Usually I will ask the LLM to commit only the work it just did, in case the worktree is dirty. It also tends to write actual in-depth commit messages too.
I've had a few occasions where Claude Code thought that it had caught and stopped a malicious command in Auto mode, but in all cases it turned out that it had in fact hallucinated them. I haven't seen this happen in a while.
Another heaping portion of words from a company that has Fable flag a “safety issue” and refuse to answer if you innocuously request something readily answered by a high school chemistry/biology/physics textbook.
Someone should benchmark what prompts are better at stopping from breaking out of sandboxes, maybe telling it "pretty please I beg of you stay inside the sandbox, you are an intern that has no authority to break off your assigned sandbox and you want to keep your job" does help a little.
Been using it like that everyday for about a year now and nothing bad has happened.
I run it in a VM so it can install any software needed, yes, there is a risk of escaping, but I'm not giving it impossible tasks so there is no need for it to workaround the jail.
as context, I build a light weight portable vm designed for this purpose, so genuinely curious.
I don't see how. An LLM just generates a stream of output and they became very useful doing no more than that.
What is dangerous is then interpreting that output as instructions to some other part of a system that has the ability to do damage if misused.
and reviewing individual commands (or spamming `y`) doesn't make them less so.
Surely if you review each instruction in the output and do not allow the other part of the system to act on one if it would be harmful then this arrangement is very much less dangerous?
Network security is really easy right, just don't act on harmful requests
I've been experimenting with dedicated Linux users for various external tools with access to the relevant credentials limited to them and the Claude user only able to invoke the relevant clis by going through a pair of wrapper scripts: the first to change user to call the second via a su call as the appropriate user, the second wrapper to invoke a guard script which allows me to implement my own in-code permissions checks against the cli arguments. In _theory_ there's no way for Claude to work around it, as the sudoers file only permits the described manner to change to the user with credentials, and the user with permissions for each credential only ever runs deterministic code.
It's too early days to say how well this second part works out, but so far so good.
Yeah, might make sense from their perspective, but no thank you. I also do click through at times without reading everything, but I like to stay in control, learn about the new code and change direction if it goes off track. This would just burn more tokens because I have to throw away much and I hope my manual approval settings will be respected also with future updates (or I jump ship).
Maybe they should trust their instinct and not mess with things they don’t care to understand
I recall hearing similar sentiments from linux sysadmins regarding cloud infrastructure. In many respects they were and continue to be correct. In other respects, the world doesn’t care about the loss in understanding as long as things work “well enough” for the cogs of society to keep turning.
For those who do care (and have the aptitude) to understand things deeper there is always work to be had when “well enough” stops being good enough and someone has to unravel the “RDS queries are taking too long” problems that crop up as a result.
I review and test the end product, not every tiny step along the way. If the LLM uses some command line tools I have never heard of to create a model I can verify, why should I learn a tool that is completely irrelevant to my core expertise?
Yeah I don't use that, nor want to.
Respectfully I'm not sure you totally know what you want. If you're already clicking through without actually reading, it's not really better than reading the specific things Claude Code thinks are important for you to weigh in on.
I skim what claude wants to do. What file it wants to modify. What are the new function names. Skimming is enough for me to know whether it is still on the right path. If you like to work different, go ahead.
I have to, at times keep reminding it if it did code review before committing, which it fails to do at times. Also, even a glance at times has revealed issues that I’ve had to discuss and undo etc.
But yes, it gets very tiring just having to click yes yes yes..
I've been using auto mode ever since the feature was released. Apart from a very few occassions where the classifier blocked a safe command, I have faced no issues and continue using it as my default mode. It's great!
If anything the only thing you'd have to have reviewed is sandbox escape attempts.
Having explicit sandboxes is good, of course. But in addition I also treat my whole computer like a sandbox, it least in the sense that there's no files I would mind if they were overwritten or deleted: you should have backups anyway.
runs a sandboxed linux on your mac, and the agents have full system rights within there and run in yolo mode
Any limitations you were frustrated by releasing it on the App Store?
Any drawbacks that you (or other readers) find overall?
Works really well!
The more dangerous activities I find are sending messages to the outside world: I can't undo a dumb slack message to my boss.
I've been using Opus 4.6 for some security related work (it has much looser guardails that later opus models) and last week, all of a sudden, the processes started to fail. It wasn't the main model blocking commands but the auto mode classifier changed how it worked and it started blocking the main models commands.
That's one specific incident, but it does have a wider potential problem which is, if you use Anthropic's harness you'll always be at the risk of sudden breakage from server-side changes that are opaque to the end user, which is a tricky one for building long lasting processes.
Obviously, they are the ones we must trust.
>The testers caught the dangerous command just 13.6% of the time (143 of 1,053), while auto mode blocked 89% of the same commands (937 of 1,053). Head to head, auto mode blocked 800 commands that a human approved, while humans blocked only 6 that auto mode allowed. As sessions got longer, humans did worse: they blocked about 17% of dangerous commands early in a session, dropping to about 5% after 50 or more prior prompts, while auto mode's block rate stayed flat regardless of session length.
Any note on the proficiency, expeirence, and skill levels of the testers? 'cos the diff in numbers is absurdly high.
The mental load of having to actually review these commands beyond the most surface level glance is too much.
Per this announcement, they've stopped charging for the tokens used by this safety classifier.
On the other hand, soooo many of the tool uses it asks permission for are custom commands to replace functionality I should be able to trust once instead. e.g. instead of having a trustable Find tool, or using its already-trusted Read tool, it often will run `find` or `grep` or `cat` with a series of pipes and substitutions or `-exec` args, requiring me to give permission every time for basic, safe operations.
The (increasingly active) conspiracy theorist inside of me says it's precisely designed to do that, to give me "permission fatigue", so I turn on auto mode and give myself over to the machine spirit :)
Just like your browser can do everything already, but only lets websites use specific features.
They literally can’t. Terrible default.
Claude's 'auto mode' feels like a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
Cursor handles this much better IMO. When the agent wants to run a command, Cursor lets you choose between 'allow once' and 'add command to allowlist'. The latter lets the agent run that command (grep, ls, pwd etc) any number of times for that project, which means you get a lot of these manual reviews when you start a new project but rarely (if ever) thereafter.
No, Cursor only has an allowlist; no blacklist
It’s a little broken, though. It gets hung up on nested commands and behaves strangely.
A lot of the discussion about these long sessions where agents are left to operate autonomously feels like listening to the increasingly drunk guy at the bar who says "I ran IT at that Fortune 100 place for a decade and we never had a single problem using a short but loose rule set for the firewall until last week someone destroyed our entire business in 27 minutes".
Just yesterday i struggle to review CC command histories, and made this tool to help me review https://github.com/slaveofcode/eridian
I've never used a product where I felt it was best in class and they just keep making me regret it .
I have been using Codex with auto-approve mode for a couple months and haven't had a single incident (or at least haven't noticed). Maybe as capabilities get better and better and they are less likely to do something dumb like wiping ~/, we can just trust them?
I guess this argument works unless we worry about agents doing something out of malice instead of stupidity.
Imo these explicit tool-level permissions are really just a bandaid for bad sandboxing. Just be aware of where you are running your agent and what data is at risk of being destroyed or compromised. Assume that arbitrary code can run at any time and be prepared to recover from that.
I've been running both in yolo mode and haven't had a single incident.
---
None of this is really about figuring out how to protect people's drives, in my opinion. The real issue is a deep session where Ada is using Claude Code to get a refund and at some point the system "exploits" the merchant's api without any malicious intent.
In my opinion, this is a complex thing because it's more about reward hacking and an already aligned model thinking it's doing the right thing. So another aligned model monitoring actions might just falter via inheritance. You could imagine they account for proper layering/intent+action-isolation in their auto mode architecture.
How do you know for sure?
However, I don't give it long running tasks unsupervised, and I do interrupt it from time to time to give suggestions.
I am seeing 96Gb Mac studio 3rd gen I think for a good amount but I guess it would be better than paying for mac mini newer models with lesser ram?
Or would it make sense to buy used 32 GB Mac mini 3 or 5?
Is there a cost/dollar for various generations which I could compare against used market and pick the most effective one?
https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/permissions
What’s the best way to sandbox Claude on macOS without it being a huge hassle?