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Comment by robotresearcher | Hacker News Reader

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robotresearcher·

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

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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.

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

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

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

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...

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