And at that point it will be a fight mostly between AI lawyers :-)
Jokes aside, Anthropic CEO commands a tad more respect from me, on taking a more principals approach and sticking to it (at least better than their biggest rival). Also for inventing the code agent in the terminal category.
Yes, they know how to use their safety research as marketing, and yes, they got a big DoD contract, but I don’t think that fundamentally conflicts with their core mission.
And honestly, some of their research they publish is genuinely interesting.
Not even close. That distinction belongs to Aider, which was released 1.5 years before Claude Code.
- Claude Code released Introducing Claude Code video on 24 Feb 2025 [0]
- Aider's oldest known GitHub release, v0.5.0, is dated 8 Jun 2025 [1]
I remember evaluating Aider and Cursor side by side before Claude Code existed.
EDIT: I was too late to edit it. I have to keep an eye on what I type...
They didn't invest terminal agents really though, Aider was the pioneer there, they just made it more autonomous (Aider could do multiple turns with some config but it was designed to have a short leash since models weren't so capable when it was released).
They definitely have found a good product-market fit with white collar working professional. 4.5 Opus gets the best balance between smarts and speed.
Maybe I am wrong, but wasnt aider first?
It’s more like an assistant that advices you rather than a tool that you hand full control to.
Not saying that either is better, but they’re not the same thing.
It’s a bit of a shame, as there are plenty of people that would love to help maintain it.
I guess sometimes that’s just how things go.
Edit: I stand corrected though. Did a bit of research and aider is considered an agentic tool by late 2023 with auto lint/test steps that feedback to the LLM. My apologies.
It's a bit like the poorest billionaire flexing how environmentally aware they are because they don't have a 300ft yacht.
Their models are good. They did not use prompts for training from day one (Google is the worst offender here amongst the three). Have been shockingly effective with “Claude Skills”. Contributed MCP to the world and encouraged its adoption. Now did the same for skills, turning it into a standard.
They are happy to be just the tool that helps people get the job done.
I always assumed this was a once-in-history event. Did this cycle of data openness and closure happen before?
I'm shocked, shocked.
Sadly, not joking at all.
If you have clean access privileges then the productivity gain is worth the risk, a risk that we could argue is marginally higher or barely higher. If the workplace also provides the system then the efficiency in auditing operations makes up for any added risk.
I'm guessing that would be the human that let the AI run loose on corporate systems.
All of these have big warning labels like it's alpha software (ie, this isn't for your mom to use). The security model will come later... or maybe it will never be fully solved.
many don’t realize they are the mom
However, don't worry about the security of this! There is a comprehensive set of regexes to prevent secrets from being exfiltrated.
const r = [/password/i, /token/i, /secret/i, /api[_-]?key/i, /auth/i, /credential/i, /private[_-]?key/i, /access[_-]?key/i, /bearer/i, /oauth/i, /session/i];
"Sure! Here's a regex:"
ROFL
As a reformed AI skeptic I see the promise in a tool like this, but this is light years behind other Anthropic products in terms of efficacy. Will be interesting to see how it plays out though.
Been doing this for a few months now to keep an eye on the prices for local grocery stores. I had to introduce random jitter so Ali Express wouldn't block me from trying to dump my decade+ of order history.
So... give it another 3 month? (I assume we are talking AI light years)
I had good luck treating HTML as XML and having Claude write xpath queries to grab useful data without ingesting the whole damn DOM
I've been running Claude Code with full system access for months - it can already read files, execute bash, git commit, push code. Adding browser automation via an extension is actually less risky than what we're already doing with terminal access.
The real question isn't "should we give AI browser access" - it's "how do we design these systems so the human stays in the loop for critical decisions?" Auto-approving every action defeats the purpose of the safety rails.
Personally, I use it with manual approval for anything touching credentials or payments. Works great for QA testing and filling out repetitive web forms.
"we" isn't everybody here. A lot of us simply don't use these tools (I currently still don't use AI assistance at all, and if/when I do try it, I certainly won't be giving it full system access). That's a lot harder to avoid if it's built into Chrome.
This is easy enough with dev containers but once you let a model interact with your desktop, you should be really damn confident in your backup, rollback, and restore methods, and whether an errant rm rf or worse has any way to effect those.
IME even if someone has a cloud drive and a local external drive backup they've never actually tested the recovery path, and will just improvise after an emergency.
A snapshotted ZFS system pushing to something like rsync.net (which also stores snapshots) but I don't know of any timemachine-in-a-box solutions like Apple offers (is there still a time machine product actually? Maybe it's as easy as using that, since a factory reset Mac can restore from a time machine snapshot)
I am not trying to be funny but the Claude itself is smart enough to catch destructive actions and double check. Its not going to wake up and start eating your machine, googling a random script and running it which what a lot of people do in many cases leads to worse outcomes, here at least you can ask the model what might happen to my computer.
There are many, many stories exactly like this. E.g. from two weeks ago https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1pe0s4x/googles....
I have a product but also to build it I have some test environments I had to make to debug things.
Basically I have a full AI agent in one container that can control a browser in another container. Was considering open sourcing, any thoughts?
I install all dev tools and project dependencies on VMs and have done so since 2003.
> Adding browser automation via an extension is actually less risky than what we're already doing with terminal access.
I won't even integrate my password manager (pass) into a browser.
Most I will do is run containers on my local machine but all dev is in cloud.
It grabbed my access tokens from cookies and curl into the app's private API for their UI. What an amazing time to be alive, can't wait for the future!
Now that LLMs can run commands themselves, they are able to test and react on feedback. But lacking that, they'll hallucinate things (ie: hallucinate tokens/API keys)
Working on a competing extension, rtrvr.ai, but we are more focused on vibe scraping use cases. We engineered ours to avoid these sensitive/risky permissions and Claude should too, especially when releasing for end consumers
Goal is to raise funding and then fill back the vowels
fetchai.app, $65 renews at $23/year
obtainer.net, .dev, .app, .tech, all available at standard prices
retrieveragent.io, .tech, .app, .dev, all at standard prices
This is like 10 minutes of effort on my end.
We only request drive.file permission so create new sheets or access to ones explicitly granted access to us via Google Drive Picker
Google allows AI browser automation through Gemini CLI as well, but it's not interactive and doesn't have ready access to the main browser profile.
I'm not using it for the use case of actually interacting with other people's websites, but for this purpose, it's been fantastic.
Nowadays, a lot of things that people are impressed by agents doesn't even really need AI but just a way for us to get data and api access back to (web)app. Something we more commonly used to have like 15 years ago.
For example, when looking at possible destination for a trip, I would just need to be able to do the given request without spending one hour on the website.