To be clear - I'm not really talking about my personal laptop. I'm thinking about where this is going at scale. When companies start replacing entire teams with agents (and looking at the layoffs, that's clearly the direction), those agents will need real access to production systems. That's the scenario where "just don't give it access" stops being an answer.
Sure, that works today. But Meta is cutting 20% of its workforce. So is everyone else. The whole bet is that agents replace human work - and that only works if they can actually do things. Deploy, access databases, call APIs.
"Don't give it access" is like saying "don't connect to the internet" in 1995. The question isn't whether agents get these permissions. They will. The question is what happens when they do.
Right, but with scams you trick a human into doing something. With agents, you give them the keys upfront - terminal, file system, API keys - because otherwise what's the point? You can't have an agent that asks permission for every action, you'd just be babysitting it all day.
So the question isn't "how do we stop someone from being tricked." It's "how do we secure something that already has root access and runs on vibes instead of logic."
Sorry about that. I'm new here and English isn't my first language, so I leaned on tools to help me phrase things and it ended up looking like a bot. Lesson learned-I'll stick to my own words from now on. The point is real though. I've actually been building a multi-agent system and that separation between coder and reviewer is a game changer for catching bugs that look fine on the surface. Anyway, won't happen again.