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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

AI tools are honestly unusable without running in yolo mode. You have to baby every single little command. It is utterly miserable and awful.

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And that is how easily we lose agency to AI. Suddenly even checking the commands that a technology (unavailable until 2-3 years ago) writes for us, is perceived as some huge burden...

The problem is that it genuinely is. One of the appeals of AI is that you can focus on planning instead of actually doing running the commands yourself. If you're educated enough to be able to validate what the commands are doing (which you should be if you're trusting an AI in the first place), then if you have to individually approve pretty much everything the AI does you're not much faster than just doing it yourself. In my experience, not running in YOLO mode negates most advantages of agents in the first place.

AI is either an untrustworthy tool that sometimes wipes your computer for a chance at doing something faster than you would've been able to on your own, or it's no faster than just doing it yourself.

I approve every command myself, and no, it's still much faster than doing it myself.

>if you have to individually approve pretty much everything the AI does you're not much faster than just doing it yourself

This is extremely disconnected from reality...

Better to continuously baby than to have intense regrets.

Only Codex. I haven't found a sane way to let it access, for example, the Go cache in my home directory (read only) without giving it access EVERYWHERE. Now it does some really weird tricks to have a duplicate cache in the project directory. And then it forgets to do it and fails and remembers again.

With Claude the basic command filters are pretty good and with hooks I can go to even more granular levels if needed. Claude can run fd/rg/git all it wants, but git commit/push always need a confirmation.

Would Linking the folder so it thinks it's inside it's project directory work?

That way it doesn't need to go outside of it

I have to correct a few commands basically every interaction with AI, so I think YOLO mode would get me subpar outcomes.

If it gets the command wrong it’s exceedingly unlikely to be a catastrophic failure. So it’d probably just figure it out on its own.

I mean the direction of the AIs general tasking, it will do the command correctly but what it's trying to achieve isn't going in the right direction for whatever reason. You might be tempted to suggest a fix, but I truly mean for "whatever reason". There's dozens of different ways the AI gets onto a bad path, I would rather catch it early rather than come back to a failed run and have to start again.

I suppose the real question here is “how often should I check on the AI and course correct”.

My experience is if you have to manually approve every tool invocation the we’re talking every 3 to 15 seconds. This is infuriating and makes me want to flip tables. The worst possible cadence.

Every 5 or 15 minutes is more tolerable. Not too long for it to have gone crazy and wasted time. Short enough that I feel like I have a reasonable iteration cadence. But not too short that I can’t multi-task.

I mean, given the linked reddit post, they are clearly unusable when running in yolo mode, too.

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