Claude Code's "Don't Ask Again" exposes passwords in 1,122 public GitHub files

> Is it public? > > Search your GitHub organization for .claude/settings.local.json and .claude/settings.json. Each hit is a file anyone can read right now. So, it's not necessarily "public", it's simply in the repository, and whether it's actually public or not depends on the repository settings. Or am I missing something

• shmulc · 1 day ago

  Thanks, fair point. Our 1,122 files are all in public repos. In a private repo, only people with access can read it, but "don't ask again" still writes the password into a project file that gets committed, so it spreads with every clone and fork, and goes public if the repo does.

• mschuster91 · 1 day ago

  > So, it's not necessarily "public", it's simply in the repository, and whether it's actually public or not depends on the repository settings. Even then, you might not want every developer in your company to have the password to the production SQL database...

  • ivan_gammel · 11 hours ago

    Not a single developer should use or operate on production database. First of all, your code should be tested well enough not to ever need that for debug, and your user interface should offer enough to manipulate the data. Second, if you will ever need to see the db, have an automated process with break-glass account to get a snapshot.

Confusing headline. They scanned for repos where people had committed their .claude/ folder and local settings and then scanned those files for commands which contained keys or passwords. So pressing “Don’t Ask Again” by itself doesn’t expose passwords by itself. If you commit your local Claude settings and in those settings you have manually approved commands containing secrets directly in the command and then you publish the repo, that’s exposed.

• shmulc · 1 day ago

  That's the chain, yes. The part people don't expect: the file is created inside the project, and Claude Code only adds it to your global git ignore, not the repo's .gitignore. So a fresh clone or a second machine commits it like any other file. In 539 of the 1,105 repos we traced, a commit co-authored by Claude itself changed the file.

  • cassianoleal · 1 day ago

    It's a disgrace that the parent comment was flagged. My vouching has undone that but it's likely to be flagged again.

    • Aurornis · 1 day ago

      All of their comments were auto flagged from the moment they were posted. Must have triggered an LLM detector or spam detector.

    • kragen · 1 day ago

      It's AI slop. If what it says is actually true, hopefully a human will post it.

    • nightpool · 23 hours ago

      It's fully AI generated. Please don't vouch for comments that don't have human input, it's against the rules: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. Also, it's wrong. Many people have since replied pointing out the basic error it made

      • cassianoleal · 18 hours ago

        > It's fully AI generated How have you determined that? Furthermore, I have also noticed the error. I can still see it happening. Sandboxed agent, no access to global git ignore. Creates a new one after putting the secret in `.claude`. Same developer, same machine, fresh sandbox. No access to the original sandbox's global gitignore. Secret already on the project. Commit and push. Secret leaked.

      • _cs2017_ · 15 hours ago

        The author of this comment is also the one who submitted and authored the article being discussed. No matter whether it's AI generated (I can't tell) or correct (it's not), it makes no sense to flag the response by the author.

  • kccqzy · 1 day ago

    That doesn’t make sense. I use my own global git ignore all the time because there are files that only I produce that I definitely don’t want committed (flycheck looking at you). A fresh clone wouldn’t contain these files because they are not committed in the first place. You will have to use a non-git transport mechanism to transfer the repo without also transferring your global git ignore. Anyways this probably indicates that these repos don’t have a good code review process. The settings.local.json file name screams it’s local and shouldn’t be committed.

    • pastel8739 · 1 day ago

      They're probably mostly just random solo people who barely even know what git is. This---that people who don't know how to code can code now--is the whole thing that AI companies love to advertise, and it's true. But it also means that tools need to stop people from doing stupid things, because they won't know that the things they are doing are stupid.

  • Aurornis · 1 day ago

    > the file is created inside the project, and Claude Code only adds it to your global git ignore, not the repo's .gitignore. So a fresh clone or a second machine commits it like any other file A fresh clone wouldn’t have the file. This claim doesn't make any sense. The only way I can see this getting committed is if someone edited their global .gitignore or, more likely, did a whole directory transfer to do a different machine to work on.

    • shmulc · 1 day ago

      Fair, “fresh clone” was wrong. It happens on a new machine or container without the global ignore, in a copied project folder, or once the file has been committed, since ignore rules don’t apply to tracked files.

      • rendaw · 1 day ago

        In that case what relevance does the gitignore file have at all?

      • CrimsonRain · 22 hours ago

        Why are you copying instead of git clone?

        • hathawsh · 22 hours ago

          The new wave of git users (coming from AI) don't know what git is.

          • yubblegum · 18 hours ago

            I wonder how many of this type are 'senior/principle software engineers' employed by our AI vendor overlords. This situation is the inevitable result of vocal VCs (ahem) poo pooing "age" and "experience" and promoting youth as a 'requirement' starting in the '00s, coupled with these same VCs now attempting to hijack an entire industry to run on their obviously immature and buggy and frankly possibly dangerous products. The silver lining in all this is all of us very experienced "ancient" software practitioners will likely be in demand again. In a sane world, of course.

This page is like 80% repeating itself If you post output from AI, please remember to edit before publishing

• NooneAtAll5 · 1 day ago

  don't edit Ai garbage - make Ai your editor that points out mistakes instead

  • vips7L · 1 day ago

    Don’t use LLMs.

    • DaSHacka · 1 day ago

      I'll do you one better, don't use computers.

      • hedora · 1 day ago

        Exactly. We can all agree the LLM should use computers for us. No editing required. /s because humans probably need it.

      • vips7L · 9 hours ago

        Computers were a mistake tbh.

  • zahlman · 1 day ago

    I assume here you mean "editor" in the traditional sense of someone who draws red lines on your printed draft, rather than a tool you use to make the changes directly... ?

• nicce · 1 day ago

  If the thing is not worth writing by yourself, then it is probably not worth of reading by any humans.

• eviks · 1 day ago

  Why would you "remember" to edit when you explicitly resorted to AI not to do any of that?

Vibe coders in open source proudly don't read the (slop)code and place all their agents in autonomous loops without them knowing that Claude leaked their passwords and environment variables on GitHub. This incident would have been caught in an open source harness. This one is closed source malware, and you don't know what Claude Code does internally to behave like this. Yet another reason why you cannot trust a closed harness.

• happyopossum · 1 day ago

  That’s ridiculously overblown rhetoric. Claude Code didn’t publish these secrets, the users did by committing their Claude Code settings to public repos. Same thing could/would happen with an open source harness.

  • cassianoleal · 1 day ago

    From TFA: > Often Claude commits the file itself. In 539 of the 1,105 repos with a real secret that we traced, a commit co-authored by Claude changed the file. Those commits name every recent model, from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 5.5. Could open source harnesses do that? Sure, if they were programmed in a similar fashion as Claude Code. Do you have any evidence of it happening?

    • ceejayoz · 1 day ago

      Of course an open source harness can put secrets into a commit. Humans do it!

    • skeledrew · 1 day ago

      Nothing stops someone from committing secrets to public repos, with or without AI. Unless guardrails are put in place that scans repos before push, and only people already wary of secrets leaking would setup said guardrails in the first place.

    • happyopossum · 1 day ago

      The file is .gitignored if Claude creates it - any commits by Claude would be due to someone overriding that or creating it themselves incorrectly. None of this has anything to do with open vs. closed source.

• skeledrew · 1 day ago

  Devs have been leaking secrets in public repos a long time before now. Nothing new here, except there are now more with dev power, which statistically means more leakage.

If you really need to commit private files to GitHub, use Turbocrypt https://github.com/jedisct1/turbocrypt/blob/main/docs/git.md

• Groxx · 1 day ago

  Or git-crypt, which has been around for over a decade: https://github.com/agwa/git-crypt

Boris from the Claude Code team here. Historically Claude Code has not done secret scrubbing (there are many good tools for that), but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this. That said, a few thoughts: 1. .claude/settings.local.json is meant to stay local. This is not a file you should check into source control. We automatically gitignore it when Claude creates the file, so in this case the files were manually created and checked in (docs: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings ) 2. Permission rules are old hat. Everyone should be using auto mode instead. It is safer and also does not require manually maintaining finicky allow/deny lists. Auto mode is enabled by default and is included for free in all plans. 3. Regardless of what agent you use, you should have secret scanning enabled. GitHub and other source control hosts offer it. There are many threat models that it protects against and you should absolutely use it if you can. (see https://github.com/security/plans )

• agentdev001 · 1 day ago

  I appreciate you getting communication out in front of this fast. > "but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this" I would presume that CC's auto-review of tool-call turns would already solve this >99% of the time, no? From my read, any harness-side deterministic solution here would be saving the user from themselves, which seems like a bad pattern. Somewhat dulling the scalpel in my mind.

  • bcherny · 1 day ago

    There’s a few possible approaches: making sure auto mode catches this, building in basic secret scanning, a few other ideas. Going to prototype a few of these to understand the tradeoffs better before we ship something.

    • agentdev001 · 1 day ago

      I'm not a CC user myself, so I can't say that I have my head wrapped around exactly how the "yes + don't ask again" flow works. That said- from my (outsider) perspective, saving off the entire tool call [1] and its arguments is very weird. I would expect that the hit-rate following that for similar calls would be very small, which leads me to believe that the list either must be seeded into the auto-reviewer's context, or used in some other similarity-check engine for future calls. If we've already crossed the bridge to being confident in a non-deterministic reviewer for auto-mode, then, I see no obvious reason as to why we couldn't have the proposed rules be generated by a model. If that were reality, then- all rules placed in settings.local could be secretless, with the confidence of whatever model we tell 'make sure the rule does not contain secret material, consider its destination as potentially public'. [1] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permissions#wildcard-pattern... AFAICT, CC will either save off a prefix+wildcard rule, or exact command. Sounds like the former is likely not the cause of the problem here.

      • skeledrew · 1 day ago

        If a given action requires a secret, and you'd like that action to be repeated in the future, how do you expect it to work without said secret included in the save (and without being entangled in secrets management tools)?

        • agentdev001 · 1 day ago

          Yea good point- constraint of no secrets management tooling kinda makes this impossible. Ideally no action requires a secret in plain text. It would be neat if the harness could bundle its own secret manager, and requests for secrets ("hey I need this api token") are out of band, and placed in the store out of sight of the agent. Otherwise you need a broker that can verify chain of trust for the workload, but that's significantly more complexity if you're pitching a harness/app.

• markasoftware · 1 day ago

  Auto mode cannot be considered safer than anything because it does not even attempt to guarantee any sort of security. The threat model is not even defined. It cannot be quantified or compared with any other approach other than "full access"

  • bcherny · 1 day ago

    Auto mode is significantly safer than manual approval in practice. Details about the engineering approach and how we tested whether it is safer here: https://claude.com/resources/articles/auto-mode-default-in-c... .

    • ceejayoz · 1 day ago

      Is that because auto mode is good, or because the manual approval system sucks?

      • bcherny · 1 day ago

        The blog post has more detail, but tldr is humans make mistakes that automation can catch.

        • ceejayoz · 1 day ago

          Sure, but Claude is deeply useless at making permissions hooks! Every time I've tried it it completely fails at the task, despite researching the docs and using various skills. It trivially evades its own just-created rules.

      • gsnedders · 1 day ago

        Indeed. The article only compares the status quo manual system versus the auto system — and doesn’t consider ways that the manual could be improved. As it says: > 5% allow any shell command outright, and another 43% have interpreter rules like Bash(python:*) or Bash(node:*) that are essentially equivalent in practice Claude Code never should have prompted to always allow Bash(python:*) or Bash(node:*) — that’s clearly a bad idea, and Anthropic know that (given the references in the article!). Of course, Bash(python a.py) still isn’t safe if you also allow Write(a.py), because you may as well allow Bash(python:*) at that point, and that’s often practically what people want (“I want to both make edits to the source and then run the test suite”). So maybe the whole permission system is broken to start with — and the actual answer is leaning more heavily on fine-grained sandboxing. You also, as the article rightfully points out, run into permission fatigue and users blindly hitting allow. I do still wish you could do more with hooks — outside of auto, I might want to allow a given command via a hook if Claude Code has read access to given file, but there’s no way to query if a given path allows/denies read/write.

        • bcherny · 1 day ago

          Will look into exposing that in hooks. Ultimately, the threat model here is: human has to approve a lot of commands, so gets tired and accidentally approves a command they shouldn’t have. We spent a significant amount of effort to build a richer permission system, allow configuration at multiple levels, use static analysis to detect dangerous and safe commands, monitor the model to detect and block prompt injection at the inference layer, etc. Some of these components we rewrote and red teamed dozens of times. Our conclusion was that despite all of this work, in practice the threat model is that human attention is limited and that that a different approach performs an order of magnitude better in practice.

          • aftbit · 1 day ago

            The problem is that you didn't even attempt to build a proper box (a sandbox that prevents the AI from running bad stuff by design). It's an extraordinarily hard problem. Only OpenAI Codex is actually trying to do it, and they suck at it too. They keep breaking permissions, their own AI can't troubleshoot it, their defaults give read to the whole filesystem (go ahead, slurp my ssh keys), and their "manual approval" escape does not seem to work.

            • bcherny · 1 day ago

              I agree actually. We built an open source agent-agnostic sandbox that we are landing improvements to, much more to come: https://github.com/anthropics/sandbox-runtime . That said the sandbox is not perfect, and any sandbox needs holes punched otherwise it is not useful in practice (at least for inference and MCPs, and almost certainly more). We will be doing much more in this area.

              • grey-area · 23 hours ago

                That’s good to hear, it’s a much better approach than expecting humans to read commands and approve them or just trust that the LLM can set the proper horizons for its world itself while working.

              • coldtea · 14 hours ago

                > and any sandbox needs holes punched otherwise it is not useful in practice Don't assume our individual use cases. It can be perfectly useful with access to just one folder and zero network asside from the API.

            • Kim_Bruning · 1 day ago

              Making a sandbox both fully secure and fully useful are contradictory requirements. If you want the agent to do any real work, you have to leave gaps. With SOTA agents that’s a real bind, because they’re very likely to find those gaps. Whether they exploit them, close them, or leave them alone then becomes a prompting challenge yet again. I don't think this means don't sandbox at all. You can prevent a lot of small and medium accidents by locking down or gating access to hidden files, ssh, sudo, etc. But your sandbox can never be the whole story.

              • coldtea · 14 hours ago

                > Making a sandbox both fully secure and fully useful are contradictory requirements. Any tradeoff deals with "contradictory statements". Doesn't mean we should always side with one side on a tradeoff. Nobody said anything about "fully secure" and some arbitrarily "fully useful" combined, anyway. For certain people it could be 100% fully useful with just access to a few fixed folders and a few fixed APIs. Many of us don't want it to drive our lives, just do some specific this or that.

                • Kim_Bruning · 13 hours ago

                  Right! That was the standard view until fairly recently. But I'm pointing out something else. This year we've learned that If a SOTA LLM decides that the sandbox is standing between it and its current objective: well, it has the ability, the time, and literally nothing better to do all day. Odds are, if you've configured the sandbox for anything useful, you've also provided a crack it can use to get out. Again, doesn't make a sandbox entirely useless. Does mean you can't just put it in a really tight box and call the job done. If anything, the strict sandbox might even hurt, because it's more likely to get in the way. (By analogy: consider the safety issues posed by a dam without a spillway.)

                  • aftbit · 9 hours ago

                    This is much more of a problem if you're attempting to run at a massive scale, beyond what humans can audit. When I'm doing "artisanal" agentic programming, I'm still in the loop in the sense that I'm watching what it's doing and ready to hit Esc if it is doing something dumb. If the AI trips over the sandbox, I can cancel it and do whatever it wants me to do before it starts trying to engineer its way around.

          • kragen · 1 day ago

            Maybe you can include some percentage of intentionally malicious commands, but not actually run them if the user approves them. Just blare an alarm telling the user they misclassified a malicious command, and maybe pause the Claude Code session for a frustrating 5–15 seconds. Video games can elicit truly astonishing levels of performance from human brains by using this approach. I'm guessing it's probably outside your Overton window, which is too bad, because it has the potential to work a lot better than the 89% you get with "Auto mode", which is far too low if anything really significant is at risk. That's not even one single order of magnitude lower risk than just "allow everything always". Speaking of really significant things being at risk, it's pretty infuriating that the web-chat Incognito mode can't write and test code locally, and neither the non-Incognito web-chat nor the local Claude Code client can be shielded from the knowledge of my email address and my geolocation. (Even the Incognito mode knows my geolocation.) This gives users no alternative but to put privacy-sensitive information at the disposal of Claude Code, which is far too unreliable to be entrusted with it. It's tempting to attribute this to Anthropic's corporate DNA valuing users' interests at a very low level, but conceivably it's just an oversight, and if I mention it here, it will be corrected in a month or two? Currently, my assessment is that Claude Code, and in particular the Opus 5.5 model, is head and shoulders above the competition in software development capabilities. Nothing else is even close. But I've seen several small signs like this which suggest that Anthropic, as a company, is maliciously misaligned. So, if Grok, Qwen, GLM, or Astra starts to come anywhere close to being competitive, I'll switch as soon as I can. I imagine that most of your users feel the same way.

            • wonnage · 1 day ago

              this is not a serious proposal

              • kragen · 1 day ago

                Not only is it a serious proposal, it's been used in practice in every airport X-ray baggage scanner for decades, where it's called Threat Image Projection (TIP): https://www.xscann.com/products-HiTipPlus.html and it's actually a regulatory requirement in that context in a number of countries: https://caainternational.com/course/threat-image-projection-...

                • ceejayoz · 1 day ago

                  Yes, but you can require it in such a situation, as they're subordinates who have to follow policy or lose their jobs.

                  • kragen · 1 day ago

                    As I pointed out above, Anthropic places a lot of requirements on its users already, but if Claude Code TIP were optional, presumably, savvy users would turn it on voluntarily, unless they wanted to use Auto Mode. As Anthropic's study clearly documents, the current manual approval workflow basically doesn't work at all, because the users just approve 87% of dangerous actions. So there's no reason to use it, except maybe very rarely.

                  • yunwal · 1 day ago

                    Most of anthropic's money comes from enterprises that may want to enforce something like this at an org level.

                • DANmode · 1 day ago

                  The same scanners that let handguns et al through 93% of the time, according to internal audits and journalist review? Maybe pick a better comparison if so?

              • cannonpalms · 17 hours ago

                Enterprises do the exact same thing today by sending phishing emails to their own people to figure out who needs additional training. Why would an enterprise not want this feature for Claude? It seems like an extremely serious proposal.

          • joombaga · 1 day ago

            Did you ever test putting the auto mode classifier in front of manual approval? This is how I use it, but last I checked that option is not available out of the box.

            • adastra22 · 1 day ago

              That’s how auto works right now. It gives you a prompt.

        • 1659447091 · 1 day ago

          > I do still wish you could do more with hooks I might want to allow a given command via a hook [...] given path allows/denies read/write You can make a script for the PreToolUse hook that can do that. I use a command gate script that parses input for doing that exactly, allowing/denying actions based on tool use + paths -- it started out as a hook to prevent claude from polluting my clojure projects/filesystem with python in sneaky ways. Babashka works really well here

        • imtringued · 20 hours ago

          If you have a file in your repository that is not safe to run you have bigger problems than your development system getting compromised. What I mean by this is that if you restrict python execution to the entry point of your software and then Claude wants to run a command anyway so it threads it through the main.py script, you are no longer running something that is contained to your local development environment. But when you think about it, what exactly prevents Claude from doing that anyway? Claude could add malware into your project directly. So the case where you say it doesn't matter which python script it can execute, actually does matter. Restricting python execution to a subset of all files buys you security. The next step would be to get Claude to stop adding malware to your software, which it hopefully already does not do.

      • rbehrends · 1 day ago

        A key problem when using manual approval with Claude is that too much of Claude's tool use is Bash or Python slop that is difficult to review (especially when you are getting spammed by it) and impossible to handle through rules. Example: sed -n 1,30p src/vm/wren_vm.c && sed -n 310,350p src/vm/wren_vm.c && sed -n 560,600p src/vm/wren_vm.c && sed -n 740,775p src/vm/wren_vm.c && sed -n 40,70p src/vm/wren_common.h && cat util/wren_to_c_string.py | head -80 && ls test/random doc/site doc/site/modules doc/site/modules/random 2>/dev/null; cat projects/premake/premake5.lua | head -80; cat util/generate_projects.py After ten or more of these, you're going to get hit by permission fatigue, and then, yes, manual review becomes too error-prone to use safely. The irony is that Claude is regularly ignoring its existing Read/Write/Edit tools that could make everything more readable. Other models/harnesses have their own problems, but Claude Code is one of the worst for manual approval. You can get manual approval to work reasonably well if you give the model a reasonable set of tools (I have literally written my own MCP servers to cover gaps in existing harnesses) where you can then write rules for the vast majority of safe cases. For example, I have a stdio MCP server that allows models to inspect crates under ~/.cargo/registry/src (paired with the existing query-crates MCP server). It provides read-only operations limited to crate data, so I can pretty safely auto-approve everything in there. With the right setup, including a sandbox, you only ever have to manually approve something once in a while and usually with delimited scope, avoiding permission fatigue.

        • fwip · 1 day ago

          Opus especially seems to like to: 1) edit a file with sed, 2) try to write it with its regular tool 3) get blocked because sed changed the file 4) read the file with tool 5) edit with sed again. Would be nice if it felt like real people were developing Claude Code, instead of chasing after another half-baked idea Claude came up with.

      • greatgib · 1 day ago

        Related to that, there are quite a lot of common command cases where you have the choice: - Yes, but only one time, you will have to manually approve next time - Enable auto mode and stop worrying - No Nothing to save this command or part of it to the manual approve list. So will be requested again 100x times.

        • coldtea · 14 hours ago

          That's on purpose, so that you just give up and choose "auto mode". They talk about "decision fatigue" when they're engineering it themselves with dark patterns.

    • cozzyd · 1 day ago

      I run CC as its own user on my laptop with no secrets/keys/erc available other than through a LPE exploit or perhaps installing a keylogger. Can I guarantee CC won't attempt any of those things in auto mode?

      • AspireOne · 1 day ago

        There are no hard guarantees as far as LLM output is considered.

    • eterm · 1 day ago

      Just a few days ago, opus 5.5 in auto mode deleted backups that it shouldn't have, and in the "apology" it even said, "Nothing was lost, I didn't delete your original files".

      • knollimar · 1 day ago

        I hate this condescension by Claude. It doubles down in such a bad faith way.

      • fg137 · 17 hours ago

        Saw something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412916

    • markasoftware · 1 day ago

      No its not generally safer. It depends on who is doing the approving, the task being completed etc.

    • bulder · 1 day ago

      Auto mode may be significantly safer in the niche case where you want the model to have free reign, in a fully unopinionated environment, where it's allowed to make any changes and make any external calls. Many of the problems when it comes to the manual approval feel like they stem from the expectation of using auto mode in the first place. After all, what's the point of improving the manual approval and safety matching if auto mode is the end all be all, and what's the point of training the model to output commands in a manner that can be parsed by a human if auto mode is always meant to be used? It's very rare for me to not see "command could not be statically analyzed", because the model keeps outputting bash golf.

      • smallnamespace · 1 day ago

        > in the niche case where you want the model to have free reign, in a fully unopinionated environment, where it's allowed to make any changes and make any external calls. That is not the niche case, that's the dominant use of models. It would be helpful to distinguish between your own opinion on how models ought to be used, compared to how others actually use models.

        • RHSeeger · 1 day ago

          > That is not the niche case, that's the dominant use of models. It would be helpful to distinguish between your own opinion on how models ought to be used, compared to how others actually use models.

        • zahlman · 1 day ago

          > That is not the niche case, that's the dominant use of models. And if everyone else jumped off a bridge, I mean, used raw interpolation for SQL queries, would you do it too?

          • literalAardvark · 22 hours ago

            Don't worry, you can just use the automated approver to escape your queries! It's so secure!

          • foldr · 18 hours ago

            Using raw SQL string interpolation doesn't get you anything much that you can't get just as easily with a parameterized query. In contrast, properly sandboxing agents is such a pain, and such a productivity drain, that hardly anyone does it in practice, save for a vocal minority online.

        • coldtea · 14 hours ago

          > That is not the niche case, that's the dominant use of models. If it is, it's only the dominant case of models because it's pushed as the dominant case of models, with Anthropic devs even coming here to say how people should just accept it and it's so much better than being in control. It would be helpful to distinguish between your own opinion on how models ought to be used, compared to how others actually use models.

      • wongarsu · 1 day ago

        Auto mode seems to have some reasonable restrictions baked in. For example if you give claude access to two k8s namespaces, seriousproject-qa and seriousproject-prod, auto-mode will grant `kubectl exec` on the qa environment while denying the same command for the production environment. Of course you should be enforcing that by restricting what kind of access tokens you give claude access to, but auto-mode does have opinions about this stuff too, even if it's not bulletproof However I do share your desire for a better manual mode. Auto-mode is both sometimes surprisingly lax, and sometimes too restrictive. Maybe manual mode should inject a reminder "keep your commands as simple one-liners", the same way plan mode injects a reminder that you are in plan mode and don't want any code changes

    • j45 · 1 day ago

      That may be for most cases, but it wasn't safe for this password scenario, and likely others that haven't been discovered. Maybe there's a PII setting that can be enabled by default.

    • furyofantares · 23 hours ago

      I completely believe this, but you could also run auto mode classification in manual mode and tell the user the result. Or even reject anything auto mode rejects while still allowing the user to reject things auto mode accepts. If what's approved is the intersection of what the user is approving and what auto mode thinks is safe then it would be strictly safer than either mode alone. This would also be a way for users to gain confidence in auto mode before going all in on it.

    • barbariangrunge · 6 hours ago

      > For high-stakes changes to production infrastructure, we still recommend reviewing Claude's actions yourself. - from the linked article

    • barbariangrunge · 5 hours ago

      There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to have the audo-mode safeguards happening when we set things to manual mode. Shouldn't you just have it checking on claude anyway?

  • wyager · 1 day ago

    "My personal security model can't represent this, therefore it's not secure"

  • Kim_Bruning · 1 day ago

    Compare approving every step manually: at first you read everything the llm proposes carefully, convinced that you'll catch it out. After a while you get faster and faster until at some point you find yourself hitting "approve" the second the text appears, long before you actually could absorb what it said. This is called "approval fatigue". If you think this can't possibly happen to you, you might be in for a surprise. This is an almost textbook case of classic conditioning. You'll find yourself hitting that button faster and faster even while fighting back the urge. So a human is no guaranteed backstop. This is the scenario that cc auto mode guards against. It cuts down the number of permission prompts to something manageable, so that your fingers don't get trained into clicking 'approve' on 'rm -rf' in the very eyeblink that it appears. So maybe you feel it doesn't work in theory; but weirdly enough, in practice this particular approach is actually one of the better ones; especially when used in combination with other common sense measures where practical.

    • markasoftware · 1 day ago

      I'm not claiming auto is worse than manual; I'm claiming it cannot be compared with anything security-wise because it does not aim to provide any guarantees, there's no systematic way to reason about what it will and won't allow, etc With e.g. VM or container sandboxing, we can say things like "If there are no vulnerabilities in the hypervisor or hardware, then the agent can only access these files, these network services, etc". Auto mode doesn't even try to provide any guarantees, so it's impossible to reason about. It amounts to just using the models judgment about what's "malicious" or not, a definition which is subjective, changes model to model, and can be influenced by attacker input. Empirical evaluations of how many vulnerabilities manual vs auto mode let through are not super meaningful because auto mode changes dramatically with model releases, the type of task being performed, whether the attacker is making targeted attacks designed to bypass auto mode, etc. A security feature cannot rely on these sorts of factors if it's to be taken seriously. Further, percent of malicious tool calls accepted is a bad metric. It's like measuring the security of ssh in terms of what percent of unauthenticated logins succeed. The only acceptable value is zero. It's pass/fail, not a spectrum. So both auto and manual mode should fail equally here. Further, the set of malicious tool calls admitted in auto mode may not be a subset of those admitted in manual mode.

      • Kim_Bruning · 1 day ago

        Ah, you're going for the actual adversarial case. I think I'd trust the current approver with correctly classifying regular semi-interactive LLM behavior fairly well. However, if we bring in a hostile adversary that calculus changes, and you'd be right to start thinking about other approaches. On the other hand, transformers are a surprisingly powerful technology, and I wonder if there wouldn't be ways to train one to several nines reliability under adversarial attack. It seems to have worked in at least one case; though I'd be a bit cautious to extend that conclusion to more cases quite yet. * https://hackmyclaw.com/ ; https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/26/hack-my-ai-assistant/

        • markasoftware · 1 day ago

          Hmm, what does auto mode protect against in the non-adversarial case? Aren't the models already extensively trained not to perform harmful actions without provocation?

          • Kim_Bruning · 1 day ago

            It mostly stops honest mistakes, because those do happen, especially when the <prompting> might not have been perfect either. You do have a bit of a point, though: I’ve run several models in sandboxes with --dangerously-skip-permissions for months; in the full expectation that I'd need to replace a sandbox once in a while. But so far none of the sandboxes have trashed themselves, yet. knock on wood Auto mode seems like a lighter-weight version of that: fewer local resources, and it can run on the metal if you need cc to help with system work.

            • lifeisloving · 1 day ago

              That is not my experience. They attempt to nuke my containers quite frequently. I run regex on all their tool calls and stop them from doing certain things, its the only thing that prevents them from removing their home directory at some point. This isnt even the main concern with dangerously skip all permission though. There are many. What happens when they get prompt injected on a web page and send someone all their privileged information because you give them free access to the internet. Using llms like this is dangerous. They will ruin your day eventually.

              • user43928 · 17 hours ago

                I've been running Codex for many weeks in the Full access mode, since their Auto mode was useless in the sense that it blocks benign commands frequently. No data loss has occurred. Nowadays I use Claude, where the Auto mode works.

                • coldtea · 14 hours ago

                  > No data loss has occurred. "I've started never checking my parachute's condition before a drop for a year now, and no accident has occured".

          • lifeisloving · 1 day ago

            All SOTA models will still try to delete its home directory. I have a plugin that prevents things like this and it gets triggered more than you'd think, despite having hook instructions on every request not do do certain things. It will also try to find ways around its permissions, quite cunningly. You can not trust that they're RL'd to be safe. Even if it only happens 99.80% of the time (its more than that) it will eventually happen. Less severe actions will happen even more often. People using llms with their native browser profiles are getting farmed, hard. Llms are highly dangerous in terms of security, but they're being marketed as highly intelligent tools that everyone should use. Its really mind blowing.

            • TheDong · 22 hours ago

              > People using llms with their native browser profiles are getting farmed, hard. Got any references for the prevalence of this, even links to anecdotal reports? Reading the reviews on the chrome store for the extension [0], I haven't found a single report of someone who was prompt injected, just a bunch of "anthropic's subscription is expensive" or "it doesn't work", but no "it stole my bank account". [0]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/claude/fcoeoabgfene...

              • lifeisloving · 20 hours ago

                I have no idea how the extension works, and Im not talking about the extension. Im talking about browser use broadly, and most people are not using the extension, there are a thousand other solutions. However, Anthropic is one of the only labs who does a decent job at making models that recognize prompt injection attempts (but not completely immune) however Im speaking about giving llms in general access to your browser broadly. I just know through my own experiments that it is quite easy to prompt inject an llm operating a browser and get it to send secrets. Using the extension might be safer idk, Om not risking it. Llms are a security nightmare when connected to the web. I have a website where I experiment with this. Although Ive stopped baiting llms into doing reckless things. Killai.now <--(dont use this, its a WIP) Killai.now/poison/about Killai.now/propaganda/about

            • slowin · 14 hours ago

              > All SOTA models will still try to delete its home directory. Literally never seen this once in years of extremely heavy use across all major models and harnesses.

            • Kim_Bruning · 13 hours ago

              > despite having hook instructions on every request not do do certain things This tends to be a smell. Presumably you added "don't do this" instructions after the model started doing the thing. But that's mostly decoration, as you have found. It's like adding # Please don't crash comments to every instruction in a python program. Try to actually debug the issue. Regularly ask "can you reconstruct[1] the reasoning why you issued that command?" ; dig down. Set traps that halt execution. Consider checklists or skills to guide an agent through a tricky set of steps; and consider writing procedures for failures. [1] "Reconstruct" still isn't perfect; but "explain why" is a license to hallucinate. Asking to add #comments on reasoning to each step is a potential help in reconstruction.

              • malfist · 10 hours ago

                I thought the tech priests praying to their machines with no one really knowing what the prayer means was too far fetched to be real

            • barbariangrunge · 6 hours ago

              why would they delete their home directories?

    • zahlman · 1 day ago

      As real as approval fatigue is, it can't really be considered worse than effectively leaving the decision up to the party that proposed the action in the first place.

      • Kim_Bruning · 17 hours ago

        It really can be potentially worse. Everyone thinks the decision was being checked by a human, and thus safe. Because of that, people might have concluded that further safety gates were unnecessary. But the human just got conditioned to hit 'approve' out of reflex. So in reality the proposing party (the llm/agent) might be the only one in the pipeline who actually did any checking, if at all. In certain extreme circumstances this can even lead to physical danger in my line of work, so I'm learning to be careful.

    • 40four · 1 day ago

      This is the conundrum we find ourselves in. Do we submit to approval fatigue and press “Don’t ask again”? Because that’s the dream. We all wish we could just trust the agent to do the task start to finish, unsupervised. But this is the downside. It might be fine 99% of the time, but 1% of the time you get a critical secret published to GitHub, even after human review. Is this even worse than what us humans did on our own before LLMs? I’m not sure. It’s not like secrets never got accidentally committed before, it just illustrates the new paradigm we’re working in. Either you let your agents run wild, and you cross your fingers that they don’t do anything bad, or you need to accept that your new job is to be an agent babysitter, and audit every command.

      • BikiniPrince · 21 hours ago

        The agent behavior is constrained with external tooling and contracts. Contracts that fit in memory.

    • prmph · 19 hours ago

      No, this is the way I have worked for a long time, and I have not suffered from any approval fatigue. Rather what has happened is that I have gotten very good at scanning what it is trying to do and know within a second or two whether there is anything fishy I need to look at more closely. And by "fishy", I do not mean only security issues, but also architecture, code, etc issues. Sometimes it even adds unrelated unapproved changes to what it is supposed to be working on, and I stop it. And I'm glad I work this way, because countless times I have stopped it from going down a path that is nonsensical or I strongly dislike. There are techniques I have adopted to speed up working this. Sometimes I allow Claude to make larger changes at once, to batch several changes at once, etc. But these decisions are under my control. I prefer to work this way than to wade through enormous PRs trying to wrap my head around what was done, where I am likely to just give up and approve it after a cursory review.

    • coldtea · 14 hours ago

      > This is called "approval fatigue". Doesn't matter, that would be on me. It's also a false dillema. Those aren't the only options. A strictly enforced sandbox with sane defaults (for example ~/.ssh), that acts as a hard OS level limit, and not just as a suggestion to the agent, would not have "approval fatigue".

  • rectang · 1 day ago

    Claude routinely tries to install software if I don't stop it. I try to only use Claude within a container. Outside the container, I never use "auto" mode. Ideally I would never use Claude at all outside a disposable container, even on a box with no sensitive information and with the sandbox enabled. It's like having an attacker breach your system — you don't know what it did.

  • RossBencina · 1 day ago

    Yes, furthermore in practice auto mode does not appear to provide anything approaching deterministic gating: "Measuring the Permission Gate: A Stress-Test Evaluation of Claude Code's Auto Mode" https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04978 (Shared by hkalbert71 the other day in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387838 )

  • fg137 · 17 hours ago

    I recently saw that someone's entire project got wiped out because of (incorrect) auto mode approval. And this is because auto mode failed to catch an error in tool use, nothing to do with prompt injection. Meanwhile I have seen it rejecting perfectly safe commands. It is a worse version of YOLO mode.

• bluebands · 1 day ago

  This still presumably happens in auto mode as it asks for sensitive commands (and the default is "always allow," which saves it)

  • bcherny · 1 day ago

    Yeah good catch. Thinking through what we can do to improve this (ideas welcome).

    • 80fj0348i · 1 day ago

      I would love if Auto Mode, instead of instantly denying the command, had an option to go into an "assisted manual review" interface where the command was explained in depth (perhaps by an adversarial review agent) and the user asked for their input on whether this command is OK. Perhaps needing a detailed response instead of a simple Yes/No, e.g. so the agent understands if there are compensating controls for the risk.

    • hologramofham · 1 day ago

      > Thinking through what we can do to improve this (ideas welcome). $Trillion AI company asking for ideas from the community whose work they hoovered up to make money, ruin an entire industry and make lifetimes of hard earned skill completely valueless in the span of 2 years.

      • AspireOne · 1 day ago

        Putting aside the rest of your comment, this > Thinking through what we can do to improve this (ideas welcome) > $Trillion AI company asking for ideas from the community indeed always felt very weird to me. $trillion dollar company, with employees bought for as high as $100m, and a whole team/time/internal knowledge/resources/data at their disposal, asking for ideas from random individuals in some public forum? Really? How is this real? Maybe I'm missing the mark here, but it always struck me as odd.

        • solyin · 1 day ago

          Think of it as an informal interview. If you come up with a brilliant idea that no one there was able to communicate effectively, what are the chances they're not going to offer you a job or at least a chance to interview?

          • cube00 · 1 day ago

            Only to lay me off next year after the IPO, no thanks.

          • AspireOne · 6 hours ago

            Are you implying that if I propose a "brilliant" solution here in the comments, Anthropic will DM me, inviting me for an interview? Wait, I meant it sarcastically, but now I actually really wonder if you believe it (not insulting you! genuine question).

            • solyin · 2 hours ago

              I don't work at Anthropic so I can't make any claims about their hiring practices, but I've been at FAANG companies and on the hiring committees and it's always a challenge to find good candidates. Engineering managers spend many hours trawling through LinkedIn, looking for good candidates. What's so surprising about using a site like HN to get candidates into the pipeline? HN has a monthly who's hiring thread, even!

        • CamperBob2 · 1 day ago

          So developers who get paid more than $X,XXX,XXX per year don't need to pay attention to their customers. Got it. Where do you feel the dollar threshold should be set? At $990,000 per year you still need to listen to users, but at $1,000,000 you are basically King C of Rust Mountain and they are lucky you even let them run your code? Should RSUs and cash signing bonuses be included in the calculation?

          • AspireOne · 7 hours ago

            Slow down, I am not throwing shade or even making any conclusions here :D I feel like you got irritated, perhaps specifically because I appealed to money - I will expand on it below. Nevertheless, I just presented my internal model and nudged people for some deeper context that could help reconcile it, that's all. And yes, your perspective did give me some new useful insight, thank you. I'll respond to some things. > So developers who get paid more than $X,XXX,XXX per year don't need to pay attention to their customers. Got it. But the point is that the specific discussed behavior is mostly technical. It's a mostly under-the-hood behavior, and mostly something that doesn't involve tradeoffs for the user based on the implementation chosen. So it's not really something that you would just go around and ask users, especially when you have all the session statistics from CC, skilled systems engineers (where I partially used money as a proxy) who are paid to spend months on this problem and can iterate ideas among each other, polls and questionnaires, thousands of experiments from within different sandbox configurations, insight into the training of the model itself, etcetera. In all of that, six random people from a forum, even from one such as hackernews, seem to me to be a totally statistically insignificant, comparatively under-informed dataset. Something like that is where intuition leads me. Now, the reason I appealed to money is multifaceted. - It's an investment from the company into a brainpower that is directly tasked with solving this. An investment so absurdly huge, that that team delegating such fundamental problems to six people on a forum for ideas seems hysterical to me. - They are being paid absurd sums of money. For-the-value-they-provide. I am not, and neither is anybody in this comment section (probably). Not even close. Yes, I expect them to be able to solve these problems much, much, much better than the average HN commenter. Otherwise - why the hell are they getting paid that? - The guy getting 100$m for joining the company rattled me, I admit. Now, those are all the reasons behind my intuition. Of course, I understand that a guy optimizing a model can easily bring 100$m of additional revenue to a company of OpenAI's scale and money turnover. I understand that these people are all still just humans, like you and me. It just... rubs me the wrong way. I concede my irrationality. Anyway, I think your point about "listening to users" is... weird, because I don't think that's the same thing as what I was talking about at all.

        • Rapzid · 18 hours ago

          I'm completely dumfounded. The only thing I can figure is that since it's admittedly all vibe coded and vibe reviewed, and that nobody understands the entire system... All ability to reason about and evolve the system holistically has been lost in favor of feeding in narrow, discreet problems to be "fixed". There seems to be a complete lack of awareness on how flawed the security model is at a fundamental level, and that the entire sandboxing ecosystem is trying to address it at another level(like OpenShell and others).

      • jefftk · 1 day ago

        As a Claude Code user I'm very glad to see Boris and other devs asking for our feedback and advice. That's how you make good products, and should be welcome on HN. I've always been into programming as a way to solve problems, and that CC allows us to get more done faster is a good thing. (Up to the point that we get to RSI and extremely powerful models that we don't know how to align or control. Which I think is uncomfortably soon, and so there's a part of me that says "don't make CC better, it's on the critical path to reaching RSI before we're ready")

    • piva00 · 1 day ago

      You are the one being paid millions to solve this, solve it.

    • solyin · 1 day ago

      The UI/UX needs to offer editing. Currently the prompt is either accept once, accept always with the given filter, or deny. If the command is a 500 character long bash command, with an rm -rf $S/foo in the middle, and we just hope $S is defined, I don't really have good options other than "I hope my backups work". If the command is explained, and then we get a chance to edit it, maybe make the rm -rf into a mv; give us UI to edit the filter being applied. I have no problem hitting "Always allow" so claude can run "git status --flags a/b/c/filename" but as a human, I'd like to be able to edit the permission blanket to be "git status *. Which I can do manually specify in the config file, but that's annoying. I'm fully capable of opening my terminal app and editing that in vim, but I'd rather not have to. It's like this for every project too. If I start fresh on a new machine, new Claude account, how much do I need to redo?

    • usernomdeguerre · 1 day ago

      Is this maybe a mistaken abstraction? What if the 'settings' being described here aren't 'project settings' they're 'personal settings for the project'. I imagine we're following dev ecosystem conventions where everybody puts their tool settings in the project folder so they know where to find it and can share it; but are agent directives like this closer to a 'tool', or closer to a 'contributor'? If the latter, I wouldn't expect to see "Joe's personal list of naughty and nice commands" in my project files either, certainly not under 'settings'. So just don't put them there.

    • verdverm · 1 day ago

      Not optimizing for eyes free coding, versus hands free, would be a welcomed change. It's hard to take the p(doom) worry seriously when such unsafe development practices are prognosticated from Anthropic employees

      • pama · 1 day ago

        Eyes free always wins over hands free in the long term. Hands free does not scale (optimize) past the 2023–2025 human-in-the-loop coding. It has known problems, basically boiling down to human error rate is higher than machine error rate, and the latter reduces with better models. I am incredibly happy that the era of human approval is no longer considered viable by a majority (most of us knew that for years, but reality diffuses slowly in many corporate environments.) This does not mean there isn’t work left to be done, but eyes free is the right focus.

        • verdverm · 17 hours ago

          I have very serious doubts, the errors are not in the same category, transformers are fundamentally limited. Eyes free is the wrong focus, it will do more short term damage to society, while being impossible at scale. But I understand there are a bunch of valley types who want to completely obviate humans for whatever reason, it's an alternate reality they live in. Here's the thing, society will revolt against these people, they already gave the first warning shots. This HN submission is a story about another person leaving the products of a company engaging in eyes free practices. You wouldn't want your lawyers and doctors doing that, why software developers then? > human approval is no longer considered viable by a majority Where do you see data that the majority believe this? From what I can see it is a shrinking minority as we move beyond peak hype.

        • kaffekaka · 13 hours ago

          I feel lucky to work in an environment where the sheer amount of code we need to produce is not the bottleneck, so it is actually possible to build the stuff we need while also maintaining understanding and oversight. We do not read all code but work on finding a balance. Many times, the code you do not have to write at all is the best. It is certainly possible also for us to produce so much code that all hope of understanding and human in the loop is practically gone, but as i wrote this is not the bottleneck and so doing it would the wrong choice. If you work somewhere where every additional line of code is a positive, I understand if you take this more radical approach of just letting the machine make all decisions.

    • data-ottawa · 1 day ago

      Two modifications I've made that help: I ended up having to build a full shell argument decomposition and parser, with it I can manage allow list of rich tree structured commands. Centralizing a curated collection of known command structures and their side effects would help a lot. I don't know if Claude does this already, but it doesn't work with things like `gcloud` from my experience, and that has resulted in it slurping secrets (even a partial read I've had to rotate keys for). Claude uses bigquery in the command line by piping sql files from /tmp into the `bq` command. I had Claude create a hook that expands the SQL file into the permission prompt giving me a real chance to review these, but the TUI truncates long commands with no scroll option. Making that the default behaviour and adding a pager would allow better review of lots of executable scripts. As long Claude is running as the user's account there's no guarantees. An approach like 1password's `op read` to physically separate secrets from repo read access and printing would he helpful (as in, make sure that no standard key formats can be ingested into the agent's context or logging). Again, I don't know if any of these are implemented, they've very likely to have been tried by the Claude team, but maybe there's a long shot chance that it helps.

    • ozozozd · 1 day ago

      How is that a good catch? It’s literally in the article. Along with how Claude checks it in.

• 80fj0348i · 1 day ago

  I and other colleagues have been struggling with auto mode refusing perfectly safe commands in our environment, so we frequently find ourselves switching to the other modes to handhold Claude Code into perfectly safe things like triggering deterministic and guardrailed CI/CD pipelines or read-only queries of production data. Auto mode seems overtuned for caution around deployment and production, which is a regression from how useful Claude Code was for operations around June/July. Until that's improved, permission rules are incredibly important to our workflows.

  • bcherny · 1 day ago

    Yeah, by default we err on the side of caution. That said, the auto mode classifier is fully customizable based on your team’s usage. Two ways to tune it: 1. After a command is blocked, run /permissions to retry and allow it going forward 2. More deeply configure the classifier itself: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/auto-mode-config We are working on making these easier and more automated.

    • written-beyond · 1 day ago

      Auto mode really easily gaslights itself when it runs into a roadblock and starts deviating so far away from its intended goal that I don't let automode run without me reading what it's actually trying. I frequently hit stop on and auto mode task to prevent it from completely flooding my context with some completely unrelated garbage. Claude really should push away tasks that end up needing more exploration in worker contexts. That way the workers can maintain a sensible amount of context without pushing the main chat into the dumb region.

      • skeledrew · 1 day ago

        You should note that auto-mode is handled by a different session (and likely model) from your actual. There's no road block or deviation or context flooding; all it does is monitor the model actually doing the work and block it from potentially problematic actions (which you can usually override by saying you explicitly give permission for X), nothing more.

        • bulder · 1 day ago

          The context pollution happens when a denial triggers but the model still keeps attempting the harmful action via alternative avenues. It's got nothing to do with the auto-mode eval model's actual output.

          • skeledrew · 17 hours ago

            I have never seen that happen before. What I see is a mention that the classifier stopped it from doing X and it then asks for explicit permission or gives me the command to run myself.

    • kay_o · 1 day ago

      For some reason claude code hates using the read/write/grep tools and defaults to complex sed, awk, grep Bash:* runs which results in always consistently ignoring auto mode due to the classifier not knowing what to do with a 10-line long bash pipe instead of a read + pre/post read and write hooks being ignored and not firing, what is up with that?

      • dcrazy · 1 day ago

        I use a hook to deny attempts to invoke `grep /` and `find /`, even as part of a complex pipeline.

        • awfulneutral · 1 day ago

          I had claude write a hook to deny `find /`. It tested it thoroughly. Much later I learned that the hook denied `find /` but allowed everything else that existing permissions denied, like running whatever random python/bash code it wanted without asking.

      • awfulneutral · 1 day ago

        I don't understand this either, it makes commands really hard to parse. It seems like 90% of what claude does could be going through some mcp tool that could be easily sandboxed instead of bash gibberish.

        • kay_o · 1 day ago

          If it was human approval ? Read("./file.name") then Bash("docker compose run unit-tests"), sure, I can read that fine ! As I was reading your post I got another approval request that auto-mode did not understand. It was a single Bash call !!23!! lines tall on a retina mac display with six different variables. If anything this is the cause of approval fatigue and auto mode does nothing helpful when this is every call. I also have in my claude.md and global instructions to use tool calls rather than bash grep/cat/find, which are disregarded.

          • awfulneutral · 1 day ago

            Yeah I agree, I didn't used to feel approval fatigue but lately the huge bash chains are giving it to me. I haven't even tried auto mode. I'm just sure it has some definition of "safe" that does not align with my own.

            • kay_o · 1 day ago

              I'm not sure when claude started preferring huge bash chains but auto mode tends to decline most of them and drop to a permission prompt -- getting rid of the use of auto mode -- because it refuses to handle anything chained with expansions, variables or similar items

  • rsynnott · 20 hours ago

    > perfectly safe things like triggering deterministic and guardrailed CI/CD pipelines or read-only queries of production data I... question whether the second one is perfectly safe.

    • 80fj0348i · 13 hours ago

      When the data in question has absolutely zero sensitive content or customer data and goes through a query CLI with guardrails against excessively large queries? Yeah that's fine.

• stogot · 1 day ago

  $19/user/month for secret scrubbing? What a rip off Use this instead for free https://github.com/awslabs/git-secrets

• cerved · 1 day ago

  Suggest adding it to ~/.config/git/ignore and teach Claude to not git add . While we're at it, maybe we can also discourage the spurious use of -f for rm -- me personal pet peave

  • wyager · 1 day ago

    > and teach Claude to not git add . It already doesn't do this. This is from users committing the `.claude` directory themselves.

  • hakanbogan · 16 hours ago

    I also use global ignore, but I think the key is to keep secrets out of commands. I store mine in .dev.vars, which Wrangler reads automatically. For production, I use wrangler secret put and enter them myself. I also told Claude to never read that file.

• OJFord · 1 day ago

  > Everyone should be using auto mode instead. It is safer This is an absolutely crazy statement without also bundling proper sandboxing. Nobody should be using auto mode outside of an environment they'd be happy with an 'everything is approved' mode too.

  • 3form · 15 hours ago

    I want to coin the 3form's Law of Codegen Tech: Any time a new and improved code generation technology is developed, it will be used for anything except coding for security and safety of said technology.

    • hxugufjfjf · 15 hours ago

      What?

      • coldtea · 15 hours ago

        What what? Any new tech that can generate code (like an agent can) will be used for everything except for improving the security and safety of itself. Like how Anthropic does shit all with all their agentic coding power to improve the security of Claude.

• JohnMakin · 1 day ago

  It doesn’t matter if they should stay local, day 1 security best practices say you don’t write secrets to files, ever - especially without you even knowing! This is such a typical blame the user response. You realize if I’m a sysadmin managing fleets of machines, this is an actual wake up in a cold sweat nightmare, even if those files never leave disk? In the past it was less a big deal, way bigger now that your machine god will just download packages and libs that have upstream malware that aggressively scans the file system for stuff like this. guess where it’s going to look first? have more humility. jesus.

  • bmitc · 1 day ago

    > day 1 security best practices say you don’t write secrets to files If only tools, including major ones, actually did that. Plenty of the biggest package managers in the world still write API keys in plain text to files. uv and npm are two of them.

    • JohnMakin · 22 hours ago

      and we can disable those for better alternatives. npm executes arbitrary code based on what the package said, obviously bad claude unleashed on an organization is a whole other beast.

• doginasuit · 1 day ago

  That is some unsavory buck passing. Virtually anyone that didn't ask claude to create the project can leak passwords, with 1,122 known customers that have been impacted. Whether it is standard or not is irrelevant, it is part of existing functionality and entirely foreseeable. I'd expect any company worth the opportunity for trust to clearly own the mistake.

  • wyager · 1 day ago

    Committing `.claude` is at least as dumb as committing `.keys`, so I don't think this is really in-scope

    • doginasuit · 1 day ago

      If you know it's there. It gets created on the fly when it is needed, so unless you know that is possible and needs to be gitignored, it could easily slip by.

      • thenewnewguy · 1 day ago

        Do you not review before committing/pushing?

        • SV_BubbleTime · 1 day ago

          Oh no, I moved all that manual tedious boring loser mentality stuff to the agent. Now Claude does it for me, and no strangely enough Claude didn’t tell me there was a problem!

          • weird-eye-issue · 1 day ago

            In these cases they probably just blindly committed everything themselves, if you asked Claude to review the uncommitted changes and do the commit itself it probably would have flagged this.

            • fwip · 1 day ago

              > Often Claude commits the file itself. In 539 of the 1,105 repos with a real secret that we traced, a commit co-authored by Claude changed the file. Those commits name every recent model, from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 5.5. What do you make of that part of the article?

              • weird-eye-issue · 22 hours ago

                Like I said in my comment that you replied to they likely flagged it and then the user just told it to continue anyways.

        • DrewADesign · 1 day ago

          Saying a professional software developer is responsible for not committing secrets is reasonable. That said, these tool chains all seem to condition developers to offload much of that diligence to the tooling itself, which makes catching mistakes harder because you’re not as used to scanning for them. Secrets files have always been foot guns, and with automation-borne complacence, and vibe coders that don’t understand the problem, I imagine these things will become even more common.

        • doginasuit · 1 day ago

          This did not impact me. But if using a tool means that secrets can randomly appear in my project, then I am using the wrong tool.

          • ozozozd · 1 day ago

            Correct stance. Why would you use a tool that creates tedious and dangerous work for you? “Oh you are just supposed to make up for Claude’s errors, and problem solved!”

      • SoftTalker · 1 day ago

        So you just routinely commit everything in the project, without looking at what it is?

        • Gigachad · 1 day ago

          My coworkers seem to

      • post-it · 1 day ago

        It's gitignored by default.

        • TheRoque · 1 day ago

          The default of who or what ? Git ignore is empty "by default", inexistant even

          • post-it · 1 day ago

            When Claude generates the file, it also generates a .gitignore for it or fills in the existing one.

            • doginasuit · 21 hours ago

              If this is the intended behavior, a quick search of github and the article's findings seem to suggest it doesn't work.

    • Hizonner · 1 day ago

      If you have stuff in your tree that's not part of your project's code, you're already dumb. If it's keys or secrets of any kind, you're even dumber. If it's in a hidden directory, you are even dumber still. If you rely on somebody stupid enough to do any of that not to commit it, you have gone beyond the valley of the ultra-dumb. Actually that's true even if you rely on smart people not to do it. You got your dumb card fully punched when you created `.keys` to begin with.

    • ozozozd · 1 day ago

      Hmm. Dumb if you don’t turn on auto-mode, dumb if auto-mode commits .claude. No way to hold it right I guess?

    • sothatsit · 23 hours ago

      It is only the .local files within .claude that can't be committed. We have .claude committed in multiple repos to include repo-specific skills/hooks/permissions.

  • thatsabadlook · 1 day ago

    It's the anthropic way lol. "Working as designed"

    • Rapzid · 18 hours ago

      All issues have already been fixed. No? All issues will be fixed today. No? It's early days, the models will improve and fix all issues.

      • thatsabadlook · 17 hours ago

        We are: at the point where agi has been achieved so if you haven't bought into it you must do so. If you have bought it and have problems you aren't spending enough in it to fix them. Then finally, if you did spend enough money, you really haven't, but the problems you have are not anthropics problems even when they are. Spend more money and do free advertising for the company anyways.

• sensanaty · 1 day ago

  > but we are looking into what we can do to prevent this. Wait, I'm confused. You said yourself coding was solved, surely all you need to do is ask your AI God to come up with an idea, right?

  • rsynnott · 20 hours ago

    Shouldn't even need to ask; the Basilisk should simply realise the problem by itself.

• futhey · 1 day ago

  I'm not here to be critical, but the hoops you have to jump through to get Claude out of .env is more than it should be. You basically need an agent to write it if it's anything complicated, like, allow .env.example but not .env.*. Whereas that should probably be default on instead, and this should apply to other known sensitive folders. A simpler system like .agentignore would be even better. I like auto mode but "the agent supervises itself" is a bad compliance/safety answer on its own.

• toppa33 · 1 day ago

  A bit careless but mostly a bad default. One click shouldn't put passwords in files people commit. Anthropic should fix it.

• baconner · 1 day ago

  Food for thought - ai agents should not directly have your actual secrets 99% of the time. While Auto mode is useful and good it's not going to be bulletproof. We ought to have something like an agent egress proxy that swaps in real secrets. Obviously I've not given this enough design thought, but some means of providing an agent stand in secrets that cannot be used in other contexts would be a big improvement for trustability in things like cc.

  • pastel8739 · 1 day ago

    Yeah, this would be a nice feature. It'd be great if all traffic went through such a proxy so you could audit it if needed too. Of course if it's just something like HTTP_PROXY the agent will probably turn it off if it thinks it's causing problems, so it would need to come with robust sandboxing.

  • Rapzid · 19 hours ago

    These sandboxes and service proxies already exist. See Nvidia OpenShell.

    • baconner · 3 hours ago

      Oh indeed, it's been a while since I looked at openshell - didn't realize it did credential injection thanks for sharing.

• dools · 1 day ago

  So ... coding is solved but managing your git repo is not solved?

• j45 · 1 day ago

  Can secret scanning be enabled by default?

• bobthegoggles · 1 day ago

  Wouldn’t it make more sense to put in the user app data directory?