This is a sensible choice.

Their newer models are heavily trained out of the "whoopsie doopsie I deleted prod, and all backups too" behaviour from last year.

I've been running it for months in auto mode, heavily, getting it to do sysadmin tasks via SSH across multiple servers for both myself and a client, and there's not even been a whiff of anything dumb/catastrophic -quite the opposite, in fact.

I'd even say it's more careful than a lot of humans. It's extremely anal about standard "hygiene" stuff like not leaving plaintext secrets lying around, and creating post-deploy scripts to confirm that every file/dir is created with the correct permissions.

There was one time I carelessly suggested uploading (my own) private data to a random public endpoint when testing OCR options and the model actually stopped, explained the risks and refused to continue until I confirmed I understood. I decided not to.

I'm not saying it's perfect, and I'm sure HN being HN there'll be someone who responds with an example of their agent doing something dumb/dangerous (give dates/models/context if so, I'm curious!), but I think on balance it's currently more sensible, and more cybersecurity-minded than the bottom 80% of IT professionals.

This is all true for Claude, I don't know much about Codex but it seems a lot less heavily trained for this kind of stuff.

I don't disagree with anything you said here, but I find auto-mode is too permissive on the reading side of things.

I used Claude this morning to convert the financial books for my nonprofit from some export of a proprietary software (Aplos) to plaintext accounting (Beancount), and was surprised to find it had found my personal Beancount ledger elsewhere on my hard drive and modelled its plan on that. That was correct and helpful, but a bit of an overreach in my opinion, enough that I'll be sandboxing agents (with tools like nono, smolmachines, etc) going forward.

Yeah nah, one of my coworkers was building stuff via TDD yesterday and Claude Code ended up running a test that ran `rm -rf` on his home directory. So dumb shit like this does still happen.

On the dumb side, I think this was 6 August and Opus 5 (though there's a chance it was Opus 4.8), Auto Mode was copying some files into a folder on my machine, and had written a small script to do so: one of those $SRC / $DST situations. And of course, the inevitable happened - it never set $SRC in the bash script, and started copying from the root of my filesystem instead. I'm not sure how I caught it, but I came back to one of those Claude "I need to be honest with you — I caused I problem that I need to clean up" situations.

It wasn't dire, no data loss (just a nasty cleanup) and Auto Mode has mostly made me more productive - I can finally walk away from the screen for long periods of time and do other things. But I need to watch what the model is doing... which is the exact opposite of what I just typed.

Honestly, I've actually just downgraded my Claude and started looking for other options. The content filters on American models are now actively interfering with my everyday work, so I think it's time I try the Chinese models more deliberately, now that Kimi & Qwen have caught up to the US.