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Comment by bubblyworld | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who just runs claude code in yolo mode? Curious about these tools for fine-grained permission, did you get burned in a bad way?

I think I'm going to trigger half of hacker news with this, but honestly nothing claude does on my machine seems particularly scary, and it's way too far from AGI for me to worry about hostile takeover right now =P

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Personally yes I do run it in yolo mode. And I think, to the extent anyone will use this project, people mostly won't be using the fine grained control. For me toolsets and full yolo are what is useful in this project.

I think the real use cases are something like:

1. Try cautious mode, gain confidence, switch to yolo 2. Use yolo mode and find that it keeps doing something that annoys or scares you so you configure an exception for it

On number 2 I thought I would use it this way to prevent some unwanted behavior but I ended up learning how to avoid those behaviors in other ways.

I think if I end up not finding a real person (or myself) using them I'll ax it. It would take some heft off the project. Maybe just yolo OR cautious and call it day.

Removed. <3

Fair, I've had a similar experience. The edge-cases like installing weird dependencies (somebody mentioned that on this thread) I just deal with by changing my CLAUDE.md, and so far that's been fine.

I just rub it in Docker to limit folder access and prevent it from being able to push to my remote repo. Indestructible.

Not a bad idea, thanks.

I use their official dev container config and limit access to a small list of domains too

I remember seeing on twitter how Claude 4 Sonnet tried to run rm -r ~ for some reason within cursor. It could have been a meme potentially, but from my experience this doesn’t seem to be to far off as it does weird things for weird reasons sometimes

It was because it had created a directory named "~" and then tried to remove it, which Bash would of course interpret as the actual home directory

"Scary" doesn't need to mean Skynet taking over, it could just mean that Claude decides to yolo install a library with malware in it.

Yeah, that's fair, but in this particular case I have instructions to avoid dependencies unless absolutely necessary and that works well. It's not a risk I'm super worried about.

There’s an infinitesimal chance that it’ll p0wn your repo.

There’s a strong chance it will remove your web service auth filter chain to make an integration test pass.

If you add mcp tooling you can quickly go off local.

I’m less worried about hostile behaviors than stupid ones.

Honest question: What could it do to your machine if it went crazy? I've not used Claude Code yet.

Anything you can think of, but IIRC it asks you if it can perform a particular command (you can tell it to remember that it can or something like that).

Literally anything a terminal command can do to your machine. Delete things, install malware, send your data to the FBI, start a fire by overheating (ok, now I'm just kidding... or not)

Anything your user has permissions to do, basically. It is absolutely possible to cause serious issues with it in yolo mode, but for me the risk seems acceptably low.

A simple and very plausible example is deciding to run an innocent `find -delete` intended for a particular directory (to clean up temporary files, perhaps) but being confused about what the current directory is.

Side question... how much is it costing you to run Claude Code on a regular basis?

I'm not a heavy user by any means. I use it for project setup and routine-but-hard-to-automate refactoring, package upgrades, config files, fiddly stuff like that, for which it has been awesome. For me it's ~$30/mo.

FYI: Claude Code was just added to the Pro Plan ($20/month). I just switched. My usage was roughly the same.

https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...

Thanks, good to know!

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