I have been running two or three Claude’s bare metal with dangerously skip permissions all day every day for two months now. It’s absolutely liberating.
Many moons ago, I accidentally rm -rf'd the wrong directory with all my code inside poof, gone. I still had PyCharm open, I checked its built-in version tracker and lo and behold, my code as it was before I rm -rf'ed up my code. I believe Claude has ways to undo file changes, but something like rm is just outside of its scope.
Is it worth the risk? For me yes. Today Claude decided to checkout a git commit from yesterday and all local unstaged changed were lost. Annoying mistake. Lost 6 hours of work I think. Nevertheless I still prefer giving all access to Claude. Also root. It can do everything.
It doesn't even need to go that low level, writing a program is just the worst case. There are ways to mass delete without `rm`. Example: `find` with the `-delete` flag.
my point being, you can add guard-rails around all these methods, but I would also add an error "IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, ARE YOU DELETING THINGS YOU SHOULDNT BE? ASK THE USER" as an error message. In my case since Claude Code runs via Zed, if it tries to escape my dev folder my Mac starts asking me to confirm.
I get it, but these guard-rails are more suggestions and subject to interpretation. I would be more comfortable with a sandbox environment in a container. To be fair, I mess around with Claude Code and OpenCode running against various open models and haven't had any problems.
Also, is overwriting the same a deleting? Maybe it will just clobber your files with echo >file and mv them out of the way.
Maybe it realizes you have Time Machine backups enabled, so deleting your entire directory is permitted since it's not actually deleted. ;)
Haha I like that too, I agree. I would love a ultra lightweight alternative to docker that isn't docker, and doesn't require much effort to get into. I liked Vagrant back in the day, but that is in no way more lightweight than Docker.
So it's basically adding "don't delete my files pretty please" to the prompt?
EDIT: I misread, the natural language description of the rule is just a shortcut to generate the actual rule which is based on regexp patterns.
Still, it only protects you against very specific commands. Won't help you if the LLM decides to fill your disk with `cat /dev/urandom > foo` for example.
I am sure that someday I will do something fat-fingered myself as well, but I have not in many years now. Are you saying that you make "damaging mistakes" relatively often?
I know many who only use binaries from trusted sources, that do monitoring, provide certificates and checksums, and so on - and run them in an OS sandbox too when they install them.
