why don't anthropic and openai ship yolo mode by default?

Human-Cabbage 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They do…? Well, “auto” mode has been default in Claude Code for a couple months now. It’s effectively “safer yolo:” tool calls are inspected by a separate classification system (another smaller LLM, I believe) to approve or deny. And you can always layer on additional sandboxing mechanisms to limit the blast radius deterministically.

	▲	vmg12 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> They do…? Well, “auto” mode has been default in Claude Code for a couple months now They have never shipped "yolo" mode by default. Auto mode is not yolo mode. They trained a task specific model just for ensuring the llm didn't accidentally delete every file from your computer.

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SyneRyder 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anthropic basically does at this point with Auto Mode being default. Or was that the point you were making?

	▲	jaykru an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That is the point I was making, that auto mode is itself a guardrail on top of the model (and not a perfect one.) auto mode seems to cover merely actions the model could take that are clearly bad, like wiping your disk, using an overly privileged context to complete the task, etc. I recently tasked a GPT model in Codex with implementing part of a new architecture I'm working on. I gave it a very detailed spec and the code it produced looked pretty reasonable and passed my tests. It even did exceptionally well in my evals, so I excitedly declared victory to a few friends. The next day after more careful review I found that the architecture implementation was totally correct, but the model had slipped a one line change to the observation encoding of the RL environment I was prototyping against. The encoding change made the learning problem essentially trivial; the architecture itself, I later realized, had a major flaw that was revealed by returning to the natural encoding. This is the type of reward hack that is hard to paper over with easy guardrails like auto mode and even harder to specify out. It's also the type of thing a reasonable human wouldn't do unless they were intentionally trying to deceive you.