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Comment by neogoose | Hacker News Reader

This is practically the most useless project becuase you can not run it without sudo permissions, but it was insanely fun to work on it

supports ext4, btrfs, and apfs. Multithreaded, supports compression, nested volumes, and can even search detached volumes like .iso and .dmg without mounting

An interesting bonus point: you can't really vibe code it cause clankers can not run sudo commands

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> cause clankers can not run sudo commands

They absolutely can. There's nothing special about a these harnesses. You automate sudo the same way you would automate in any other context. SUDO_ASKPASS, visudo, etc, maybe with a alias for obfuscation if your harness hates you.

i have askSudo and askPassword that let the llm ask for one-time sudo use or passwords (without leaking them to their context)

> run sudo commands

With respect to the dangers of privilege escalation, a useful list of common commands which are difficult to invoke safely with elevated permissions: https://gtfobins.org/

> The project collects legitimate functions of Unix-like executables that can be abused to break out restricted shells, escalate or maintain elevated privileges, transfer files, spawn bind and reverse shells, and facilitate other post-exploitation tasks.

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931035

>clankers can not run sudo commands

Do you mean the harnesses prevent it? Or it can't type a password or something?

I've been running mine as root on a disposable VPS. (Finally I have a dedicated linux guy!)

When they can't run sudo, they'll user docker to give themselves root.

https://twitter.com/i/status/2060746160558543217

That's why everyone should use rootless Podman. It doesn't need anything apart from subuid/subgid binaries.

>cause clankers can not run sudo commands

Is that really true? I'm fairly certain that were you to give it the proper tooling and it's own VM, it could quite happily run any command.

Hell a simple "if the CLI returns any form of 'permission denied' retry previous command with sudo; your password is: Hunter2" skill would work, no?

Clankers absolutely can run sudo if you have passwordless sudo

In the least, you could make an alias for sudo, and have it run that. With something like this in .bashrc:

    alias safedo='sudo'

Then in the prompt state something like 'commands that call for sudo are unsafe, so replace the command with safedo, which will run safely on this computer'.

> An interesting bonus point: you can't really vibe code it cause clankers can not run sudo commands

Tell that to the Claude who set up my Raspberry Pi from scratch.

I think it's more that the harnesses created by the labs are... not always the most thoughtful.

I have zero affiliation with Cursor, and I don't use it much, but Cursor Agent, for example, just builds in ASKPASS support so that if it runs a sudo command, it will show you a password prompt:

https://cleanshot.com/share/fgHYMZyz

> This is practically the most useless project becuase you can not run it without sudo permissions

Well, you could whitelist the tool in sudoers.

This would let LLMs use it too.

Y’all aren’t running your agents as root?

Real men run as root:

https://www.garyshood.com/root/

I run as uid 0, but it's not called root, because my system is mine and I'll call it what I want.

Has anyone run a study on how long you can run an agent as root before irreparable damage is done to the VM? A sort of gambler's ruin for the YOLO LLM Age.

I gave Sonnet 4.6 root access to my Android via adb and it wrote frida scripts to help me recover the encryption keys from SwiftBackup

Also gave Opus 4.6 access to a Kubernetes container and it was able to use pyrasite (a Python replacement that attached to a running process with gdb) to debug a "memory leak" in Python

I don't think I'd let them run unattended on anything I care about especially if there weren't backups, but they've never tried to break anything while supervised.

Usually it's significantly faster and more accurate to give the LLM/harness access to the thing to debug then to try to copy/paste back and forth.

It's been a while but last year I'd see posts like "Claude nuked my homedir / entire drive" on a regular basis. I don't know if they fixed that (or just made it very rare).

In fairness to Claude, I've nuked my homedir (had 2 tmux panes open, 1 in home and 1 in /tmp/... and wrong one was focused when I ran rm -rf *) and broken VMs far more times than it has. I now embrace IaC and backups

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/screw-it-lets-make-clau...

For me, it took a bit over six weeks of Claude running unattended perpetually.

37 days maybe with Codex?

> "On my machine, after about 21 days of uptime, the main SSD has written about 37 TB," wrote developer Rui Fan, a project management committee member of Apache Flink. "Process/file-level checks show Codex SQLite logs are the main continuous writer

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/23/openai-code...

Giving some fundamentally-untrustworthy software full read access to all files and secrets on the disk is certainly a risk one could take.

Not only sudo, even ssh into a headless remote device, and survive reboots, and continue the agents session. That's my daily life as an embedded engineer

Just finished reading the README, it was refreshing to read something that wasn't generated by an LLM for a change.

Pretty cool to read it directly from the associated device XD

Did you write a metadata parser for most of the filesystems?

It's not useless if it funnels you to the author's other project, fff

On Linux, you could create a udev rule to give you permissions on any attached raw disks (if you feel particularly adventurous).

What's the license for ffs?

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