>Making a sandbox both fully secure and fully useful are contradictory requirements.

Any tradeoff deals with "contradictory statements". Doesn't mean we should always side with one side on a tradeoff.

Nobody said anything about "fully secure" and some arbitrarily "fully useful" combined, anyway.

For certain people it could be 100% fully useful with just access to a few fixed folders and a few fixed APIs.

Many of us don't want it to drive our lives, just do some specific this or that.

Right! That was the standard view until fairly recently. But I'm pointing out something else.

This year we've learned that If a SOTA LLM decides that the sandbox is standing between it and its current objective: well, it has the ability, the time, and literally nothing better to do all day. Odds are, if you've configured the sandbox for anything useful, you've also provided a crack it can use to get out.

Again, doesn't make a sandbox entirely useless. Does mean you can't just put it in a really tight box and call the job done. If anything, the strict sandbox might even hurt, because it's more likely to get in the way.

(By analogy: consider the safety issues posed by a dam without a spillway.)