If this tool is returning even a single hit from this, you're probably using these agents wrong. You really want to run these in a way so they cannot touch your system drive/general filesystem that you use to do real work on. Even SOTA models at the end of their context limit behave REALLY illogical and does mistakes frequently. Don't run them straight on your machine unless you have backups and confirmed your backups work.
You start really locked down, and you read and approve every request for access. You do this for a while, but never see a result you deny, so you stop reading as closely. You keep hitting that approve button. You start paying even less attention to it. You start feeling silly, like you are simply slowing the process down. You get frustrated, because you keep coming back to your session and realizing your agent has been stuck waiting for approval for a long time, and the task that would have been done by now hasn’t even started.
Now you are running even more simultaneous sessions, which means more and more of your agents are stuck waiting for your approval. You feel even sillier, because you are taking even less time now to review and approve requests, but your review step is causing more and more slowdowns because you have more sessions going so you take longer between approvals. You feel like you are spending most of your time cycling through sessions hitting approve. You still have not come across a request that was dangerous or would have caused an issue, so you feel more and more like you are wasting your time.
So you slowly start to give your agents more access with fewer review steps.
Maybe this results in a catastrophic failure at some point, or maybe it doesn’t.
Haven't seen any close calls so far. The thing just behaves. Nothing of the horror stories of eremerefing the whole home directory or a database. Am I just lucky?
Right, that's kinda the same failure mode as delete from table something and hitting enter before you write the condition or writing the wrong one. If you reach the point where you opened the terminal to do it this way you already lost.
I'm not sure what this means, the model and agent harness is the ones "opening the terminal and running this" (via a exec_shell tool or whatever), they do mistakes like this sometimes. Sometimes the scope is bigger, sometimes less, but anything below SOTA + higher reasoning efforts seems to fall into these mistakes sometimes.
The trick is not go to that limit, but stay under 50% or even better 25% of context length. But backups are a smart thing anyway.
getatme32•46m ago