However, this has still had me running code in my computer that is, to say the least, dubious. I'm using Google Gemini Pro, and while I keep asking the LLM to only give me chunks of code that it's changing, it keeps asking me to just replace, say, the main.py file completely. This has me genuinely concern about running arbitrary code on my machine, intentionally or just due to laziness.

My question here is (1) how much of a risk am I taking on running this kind of code when it's not at all related to my internal filesystem, (2) what are mitigation strategies I can take to protect myself beyond regular backups short of just doing everything in, say multipass or UTM, and (3) if I need to run a virtual machine for everything, which is the easiest to run for moving back and forth between normal use on a mac?

Really appreciate any advice here. I'm mostly a hobbyist programmer, even if I've been developing stuff in Python for a decade and a half a this point.