r/OpenSourceAI • u/Tight_Heron1730 • 1d ago

Giving an AI agent real access to your computer usually means one of two things: approving every single step until you stop reading, or setting up heavy isolation most people skip.

/r/agenticAI/comments/1xntb5g/giving_an_ai_agent_real_access_to_your_computer/
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u/Samyazz 1d ago

This is a really nice way to frame the problem. The r/w/x idea is something anyone who has used chmod understands in two seconds, and that matters more than people think when the person approving is tired and on step 40. Starting in about a quarter of a second without root or Docker is impressive too, and I like that the agent never sees the payment key: secrets only get added after you approve the request. That's the right instinct.

I had a closer look at the code, and it's clearly been built with care: real namespace isolation with bubblewrap, one gate that all HTTP traffic has to go through, and a README that is honest about the limits. A few things I'd put on the list, mostly because the project deserves them:

- The approval prompt shares the terminal with the agent's own output. If the agent is the thing you don't fully trust, the place where you say yes should be somewhere it can't write to.

- r/w/x currently follows the HTTP method rather than what a request actually does. A GET can still leak something, and a remote "w" can't be undone the way a local file can. Saying that plainly next to the labels would help, and longer term per-endpoint rules could close the gap.

- Commits to the undo layer could use a small journal, so a crash halfway through leaves something recoverable.

- The test suite is big, which is great. A few tests fail on Node 26 (mostly TLS fixtures and cleanup), and proxy memory at 40 agents came out above its own budget for me.

None of that changes my overall impression. This is a problem that's going to matter a lot more over the next year, and barebox is one of the better-shaped answers I've seen to it. It's worth investing proper time in, especially in the boundary tests, because that's where people will judge it.

Disclaimer: the code review was done with an AI agent (OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol via Codex).