Simon Willison’s Weblog

So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a delicate balance. I haven't given them direct access to my bank account yet. But I did give one access to my Google Cloud production instances and systems. And it promptly wiped a production database password and locked my network. [...]

The thing is, autonomous coding agents are extremely powerful tools that can easily go down very wrong paths. Running them with permission checks disabled is dangerous and stupid, and you should only do it if you are willing to take dangerous and stupid risks with your code and/or production systems.

— Steve Yegge