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Comment on Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits

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petcat

People seem to come up with all manner of complicated setups with virtual machines or docker or whatever.

All you need is a separate limited user account on your computer. Multi-user Unix-y systems were designed for this kind of thing for decades.

My entire development environment is literally just "sudo".

secondcoming

The advantage of VMs is that you can nuke them and be done with it if you need to.

I use my personal laptop for $WORK and everything work related is done via the VM.

petcat

I can do that too by just rm-rf the agents home directory

DaedalusII

your kernel is not isolate and if you accidentally run the wrong command in sudo you will nuke your computer lol

or just have a linux vps and ssh in for $5 a month

petcat
if you accidentally run the wrong command in sudo

I'm not seeing your point. Are you saying that I shouldn't use sudo because I might accidentally "run the wrong command"?

I know all the commands that I run and what they do.

your kernel is not isolate

Am I more afraid of an npm package exploiting a zero day kernel vulnerability on my mac? Or just stealing my AWS keys and installing a crypto miner? Sudo suits my threat model just fine.

My m3 MacBook pro is a million times more powerful dev machine than a cheap $5 vps. Why would I waste my time with that.

DaedalusII
petcat

My Claude runs as a limited user account, which I invoke using sudo.

Claude can run whatever commands it wants and the only harm it can do is nuke its own home directory. That's the whole point.

indigodaddy

They weren't getting that sudo was just your mechanism for changing user.

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