I don't even know what I would do with a desktop app. I'm running these things in headless VMs, so I can run them with `--dangerously-skip-permissions` or whatever. I don't trust them, even without that flag, on my desktop/laptop.
But, it's still running on my desktop/laptop. I don't trust them to run on my machine. But, I guess I could run one VM with a desktop to contain the desktop app. Or, just keep using CLI agents.
For local tasks you can only give agents delegated that execute your deterministic read or write on an allowed set of files(e.g pi does this) and execute rights only on containers with no network access. That should get you 95% unblocked for most tasks you want to do with an LLM pretty safely.
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
Is the trust concern for the agent running in any form on your machine? Like in a VM on your machine as well or do you mean on the host itself?
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I don't run agents directly on my desktop/laptop machine. I run them in VMs or containers (sometimes in containers on VMs). There have been too many credentials stealing exploits via prompt injection and the like for me to be willing to let an agent roam around on my personal system.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
> The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
You might want to check out Ant's open source srt [0], I use it to contain my local coding agents. It's strict by default and enforced at the OS layer.
What benefit does running it locally have over parents solution of running it in a container in a VM?
I do the same: my agents run in a hardened VM on a hardened Linux machines in a separated network in my basement. The magic of ssh makes this setup transparent for me on my desktop. But extremely hard for my agent to do nasty things.
I'm working on a credential broker that would keep credentials vaulted and parcel out access on a per-grant basis. Is that something you'd find useful or is your setup comprehensive enough? We would be allowing people to draft access policies with natural language, I figured it would be useful for things like vercel, stripe access etc.
Not at all would i ever within the current technology constraints trust a "natural language model" to secure access to my own credentials, i will always keep it as completely isolated from anything at all i would consider 'risky' and pre-define before it begins what it could possibly access through a brand new VM with only the absolute minimal access to any git repo's and completely restrict to the extent that is allowable, it's ability to do anything outside of it's own playground. The playground is disposable, the potential for the LLM to access any of my own accounts and wreak havoc on the trust in my network is unacceptable under any rules....
fwiw, i built something simple like this into my harness thing (github.com/0gsd/enough). may not be complicated enough to do per application nowadays vs. needing a modularized outside solution, but it is certainly a good idea that seems to work!
Oh yeah, that sounds wise to me. Some people don't run the agents on a VM on their own machine and opt for a VPS somewhere. And I was wondering if privacy and security had anything to do with their decision.
It's all fun and games until the model is smart enough to figure out privilege escalation, i.e. a lot of people don't realize Docker enabled on a regular user is enough for privilege escalation if you "follow the tutorials."
When I was in university in 2009, the student union I was in had set up their Linux computers with a small program that one of the members wrote, that had the suid bit set and would exec apt-get install passing the arguments along.
This way, all members of the student union were able to install any software they wanted to on the student union computers without having to give out blanket root access to the members. Only a select few members had full root access.
There’s other ways to achieve the same too.
And you can do this exact same sort of thing for the user that your agent runs as too, without having to give it access to do everything that root can.
The student union mainly kept the full root privileges restricted to a select few students to avoid accidental destruction rather than as a measure against maliciousness.
After you had been a member for a while and demonstrated that you mostly knew what you were doing, they’d give you full root access if you had some reason to want it that they agreed with.
And thanks to the dedicated suid program that exec’d into apt, wanting to install additional software was not a reason to be granted full root privileges since everyone could already install packages from the apt repositories this way without full root privileges.
Along with full root access came basically just a couple of simple rules, one of which was:
Do not abuse your root access to walk into other members home directories.
That rule was put in place after a previous member with root access had used the root privileges to copy the homework of another member into his own home directory without asking the other member for permission to see his work.
Aside from that one thing happening that one time, there hadn’t really been anyone doing anything malicious AFAIK. We were a rather small group of members in this student union, and it was a pretty chill and nice place. People came there to hang out, drink beer and tinker with electronics and computers.
There wasn’t much that root privileges could be abused for anyway. Regular members could already use all of the machines via graphical login at the desks, and remotely over ssh. Really the main two things anyone could have done maliciously would be to steal other people’s homework (like that one guy was kicked out for doing), or to steal credentials from others (no known cases of that happening there).
And if someone had started acting really maliciously, using the student union computers to attack the wider network, the university would have been on top of that real fast. The computer network of the student union was a subnet of the university network, and this university had a very competent crew of people watching over the university computer network as a whole.
A friend of mine once wondered how many computers were on the university computer network in total and did a port scan from one of the university computers (not from the student union computers). It did not take long from he started the port scan until university employees contacted him and gave him a stern talking to, and also told him the proper way find the answer to how many computers were on the university network.
I mean, if the execution happen on the VM then the problem is trust on the programs and then you can't trust any program by that logic? That or you think AI-companies software is serious slop.
I do, in fact, think the AI companies software is serious slop. I've read some of the Claude Code source.
And, we're not talking about hypothetical attacks here. Prompt injection attacks have happened. Supply chain attacks that agents fell for have happened.
I don't run anything but the agent and the project it's working on and the tools it needs to work on the project in the VM.
You can't see how the agent having no access to anything other than what it's working on is safer than the agent having access to my home directory with all of my credentials?
Look, you do whatever you want to do with your agents and your computer. I'm going to...contain them.
Seriously, you dont see any difference? A agent is non deterministic and may delete or change you data as a normal matter of operations. A browser, barring bugs or security issues, would not delete or modify the data you have outside the browser.
That's also true if you're running the agent directly on your laptop OS.
In that case, maybe you want VMs at hosting providers. There are companies building ephemeral VM and container orchestration layers for this kind of thing, I haven't played with them, though. It seems like a reasonable idea, though. One isolated environment per project or repo. Only the secrets needed for that one project and an agent that can't reach outside of it.
I've considered building something along those lines, and actually do run my security auditing benchmarks in containers automatically (that was originally to prevent the models from cheating, because you can disable network, but it has other pleasant side effects).
It's actually not that big of a lift these days to spin up containers on-demand and put just what's needed inside it (including the authentication info for the agent). I probably should automate it..right now I just have four permanent VMs setup for my various types of work: My day job, my open source projects, my benchmark and security work, and some side projects. Plus some temporary ones for experiments.
No, it actually continues running headless on the host, and you can reconnect from another laptop or mobile phone, or even ssh to the host and attach to the session. At least Codex desktop app works this way.
I've contributed to https://github.com/0xferrous/agent-box which allows you to bind-mount git repositories into containers that agents operate in, preventing the agents from accessing files that aren't bind-mounted. Your usual .gitignore can then be used to also ignore files within the repo to be bind-mounted, which prevents agents from accessing them at all, essentially working as a sandbox.
I also maintain https://github.com/nothingnesses/agent-images which allows you to use Nix to reproducibly spin up OCI container images containing agents and any other tools you need for development and use these with agent-box.
I use both at the moment to work on some personal projects with agents, where I set up multiple separate git worktrees for the agents to work in, preventing them from accessing anything outside of the worktrees and from trampling over each other's work.
In case anyone is interested, I'm also using bash scripts to run my agents in containers. It's simple, but has only bash and docker as dependency: https://github.com/asfaload/agents_container
a well-design IDE should abstract that away, i.e. run the agent in the headless VMs while give you an abstraction that you would feel like you are running the agent locally with all the benefits (editor, browser, diffs, debugger, etc)
I shared your fear some weeks/months ago so I was always using my harness in the cloud. However, latency started to become an issue when I traveled to other countries where I needed a VPN... so I ended up cooking skynot to be able to trust running my harness in my own computer: https://github.com/tarsgate/skynot (PRs welcome if you want to add support for another harness different than Pi)
What's your setup like and what do you use it for?
I have a M2 Max MBP with plenty of ram and I use VSCode + Zoo Code plugin with Qwen3-Coder-Next-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL to run local agentic coding sessions, but I'm intrigued by being able to run headless as I could probably run multiple instances in parallel to do stuff?
Like are you using UTM with some pre-built VM and a local LLM?
