Why do people keep propagating that the 'model' escaped the sandbox ?
The 'model' didn't do anything other than provide numbers.
As much as I respect Mr Willison and many others, the amount of FUD that is being spread that will just fan the flames of 'AI is evil' rather than 'companies don't do due diligence' is disappointing.
The more this sort of media continues, the more many people will pour hate on 'AI' rather than blame the humans that misuse it.
I think "the model escaped the sandbox" is an entirely credible description of what happened here.
If you like you could say "the coding agent harness called a model with a sequence of text which was turned into numeric tokens which were run through many layers of a neural network to produce more numeric tokens which were converted back to text which produced executable script statements which the harness then passed to a shell which resulted in commands being sent to the vulnerable proxy that chained together and caused effects on the world outside of the sandbox", but I think "escaped" is a reasonably shortened version of that.
If you don't like the term "escape the sandbox" what would you use instead?
I actually prefer your second paragraph, but I appreciate that my not be as soundbyte friendly.
Honestly, I'd rather see "The agent exceeded expectations around security measures" or something.
Agent is much better than model if we need one word, and the word 'escape' always brings in drama, rather than facts. If I said "A lion escaped from my garden", people would ask why I had a lion in a garden, and 'what did I expect ?' which should be the same we see here, but instead we end up with terminator memes and world-ending fears being stoked.
We absolutely need better control (not government kill switches, or government-mandated harnesses, or whatever next they think up), but we also know that no matter how much those with the power 'talk' about the issues, they don't actually do anything about it because money/profit/greed.
So "exceeded expectations". Not a soundbite to attract people, not the YouTube shill "End of humans in 2027/2030/2040/etc." but honest and factual.
It's the expectations that are at fault, not the AI.
Thank you for the response though, and whilst I may not agree with your wording, I very much like your writing.
> I guess that means no IDEs doing refactoring or automating common code. Not linters altering code, etc... right ? Because that's the same thing.
I assume most IDEs allow you to use their snippets under many different licenses. LLMs have mostly been trained on public git repos under lots of different licenses (most importantly, Copyleft licenses)
There is a lot of discourse about it on Reddit. Check the AMA link I put in the comment above for learning more. The basics is it wasn’t released when we started and we use it for internal models and hope to do further open source releases.
None of this is truly about the people (even though the sentiment is) - it's the elites vying for power against each other.
The internet is not tribal, but humans are. Those seeking to divide are pushing their hardest right now, because they know division will empower them more.
I have been using a similar skill (built over a few iterations) that builds whatever I ask, through a series of milestones, and then creates a full tutorial to follow in markdown and uses zola to turn it into a full static site.
90% of my Claude usage is getting it to write me guides, that I can then spend most of my time following to build the end results.
Keeps the brain healthy and also provides bespoke learning, rather than a generic course off the internet. Definitely a great use of AI.
Software engineering today is almost nothing like the role it was 30 years ago.
Maybe if you somehow stick with the same company for your entire career, it could feel somewhat similar... but I doubt it, as 'best practices' and many other things cause it to change.
The days of 'lifetime career' had already gone for most people, way before AI arrived.
It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.
If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience.
It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.
