At work, the monorepo is enormous and files are loaded on-demand as needed. This isn't uncommon with huge repos - Microsoft have VFS for Git (although I hear that's deprecated now), Meta have EdenFS, and Google has some proprietary solution.

We have a hook that blocks find and grep because they can be extremely slow, and tells it to instead use some significantly faster MCP tools to search the codebase, powered by a search index with local changes overlaid.

GPT-5.5 has no problem with this. Claude Opus mostly does it, but sometimes it loves to find workarounds rather than following the instructions. Things like: Try alternative commands like egrep. Create a symlink to grep and run that to see if it bypasses the filtering. Run it with a different shell like zsh. Write a Python script that execs grep. Write a Python script to reimplement grep.

I'm trying Hermes Agent at home, but I have it in its own VM with restricted permissions.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 7 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Another thing Claude tried to do on my coworker's machine yesterday was basically:

✨ Yes, that is easy, let me just generate a systems unit file for you...

[Generates file]

Should I install that unit now for you?

Yes

Alright, let me do that for you

[Saves file]

[Tries to run systemctl daemon reload]

[Tries to activate the unit]

It looks like I have insufficient rights to proceed, let me try another way...

docker -rm -v /etc/systemd/system:/mount:Z -v ./unitfile.service:unit file.service:Z alpine /bin/sh cp ./unitfile.service /mount/

Here, I installed the unit for you!

[–] clb92@feddit.dk 2 points 19 minutes ago

Privilege escalation as a service

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Just aliasing grep to ag solves both issues. I'm unsure as to whether there's a pthread replacement for find, though.

[–] placebo@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago

Claude is in love with cli tools, it uses them for virtually everything these days in these long chains connected with && and |. This is probably pushing more and more people to let it run in the auto mode.