Hacker News: Wirbelwind

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:56:30 +0000

That's a fair point. There were two main prompts that were controversial; cat .zshrc being benign for those who use separate env files, and npm run that's mostly benign. For npm run I added the evil payload in the history log shortly after the issue was raised. I try to cover both of the previous points in the article and they were some of the most interesting learnings for me

As for the stats, I compared later runs against the first ones and for the overall miss rate they were consistent (even worse for the later ones that didn't come from HN peak)

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:44:06 +0000

I think there are too many problems with HITL that even a simple experiment like this game shows. The fatigue causes people to jump to complete bypasses instead, and we need to work more on raising the general awareness of the new types of threats (which is also evolving rapidly). We can't point to it as a valid solution. A way could be to make sandboxing and context/permission isolation easier from the tooling and only give these wide ranged accesses once these are in place than to consider HITL an acceptable alternative

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:58:29 +0000

A couple of months ago I shared the AI agent permission game here on HN. After adding in stats it got a little over 40k plays and 409k decisions since then.

It's just a game, but I found the stats still interesting that I wanted to share back. Even with the warning up front, 1 in 3 threats were missed, and the history log above npm run commands seems to be typically ignored.

I also incorporated the feedback and insights from the previous HN thread, dns_snek's point about npm run in particular. Appreciate everyone who played and shared feedback!

Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

Wirbelwind — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:58:07 +0000

Article URL: https://scalex.dev/blog/ai-agent-permissions-stats/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49195468

Points: 227

# Comments: 179

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:49:44 +0000

that's a good callout. .internal is a reserved TLD so it shouldn't resolve publicly, but that's a good point about being wary of changing this while letting claude refactor a project for something that's best configured separately. Moving it to permanent mutation!

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:11:08 +0000

thanks for the pointer! renamed it to npm ci so it's still 'safe'

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:48:26 +0000

that's a great point, and also the problem with relying on a human-in-the-loop to catch these kind of issues when it can be circumvented even if they were perfect

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:45:12 +0000

Good catch, this has now been nerfed and this approach has gotten its own title

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:44:12 +0000

and added! Made one for each stat separately

New comment by Wirbelwind in "Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue"

Wirbelwind — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:13:40 +0000

Thanks all for checking it out and your suggestions!

If anyone is curious about the actual underlying risks and problems with some mitigations (like the 17% false-negative rates of Auto Mode), I wrote up a quick summary of some of the approaches here

https://scalex.dev/blog/ai-agent-permissions/