Not Claude specific, but related to the agent model of things...

I've been paying $10/month for GitHub Copilot, which I use via Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, and about a month ago, they added ChatGPT5 (preview), which uses the agent model of interaction. It's a qualitative jump that I'm still learning to appreciate in full.

It seems like the worst possible thing, in terms of security, to let an LLM play with your stuff, but I really didn't understand just how much easier it could be to work with an LLM if it's an agent. Previously I'd end up with a blizzard of python error messages, and just give up on a project, now it fixes it's own mess. What a relief!

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hu3 5 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah in agent mode it compiles code and runs tests, if anything breaks it attempts to fix. Kinda wild to see at first.

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forgotusername6 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

In agent mode there is a whitelist of commands in the VScode settings that it can do without confirmation. When I went to edit that file, copilot suggested adding "rm -rf *".

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randomNumber7 5 days ago | parent [-]

This must be a mistake. It should be "rm -rf /*"

	▲	forgotusername6 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It actually suggested four options rm -rf , rm -rf ., rm -rf../* and rm -rf ../.*

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amelius 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd probably install a snapshotting filesystem before I let it change stuff on my system (such as installing packages and such).

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ffsm8 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what devcontainers are for. You create the config and the editor runs effectively inside of the docker container. Works surprisingly good. Vscode for example even Auto proxies opened ports inside of the container to the host etc.

Will also make using Linux tooling a lot easier on non- Linux hosts like Windows/MacOS

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amelius 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's nice in theory.

In practice, they require a lot of sysadmin-related work, and installing all the software inside them is no fun, even if using scripts, etc.

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ffsm8 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's a one time time investment that most people already have partially and just needs to be transcribed (existing compose/dockerfile)

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amelius 5 days ago | parent [-]

> It's a one time time investment

No, because the software that needs to be installed into them keeps changing (new versions, new packages, etc.)

Sysadmin is a job for a reason. And with containers you are a sysadmin for more than one system.

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ffsm8 5 days ago | parent [-]

I see, it's rare to interact with someone that hasn't discovered dependency management yet and hasn't made that part of their project. If you did manage to integrate that into your, it would consequently make it a one time time investment, because things are automatically pulled in with the versions specified.

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zelphirkalt 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or isolate in a VM.