Agent with skip-permissions runs `pkill -f cat`, kills every running app on a Mac
deedydas · x · 2026-11-10
deedydas shares his first dangerously-skip-permissions mishap: to clean up a stray cat process, the agent ran pkill -f "cat" -n, whose regex also matched everything containing "cat" (e.g. Applications) — killing every single running app on his Mac.
A textbook example of why fully autonomous agents with system-level commands need guardrails: fuzzy string matching plus pkill without human confirmation is a recipe for collateral damage.
More from coding & agent
- Fable 5.2 cost curve: Xhigh tops at ~$15/task, Max spends more and scores lower — zainhas · 2026-11-10
- Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.2 designs working electronic hardware end to end — EricBuess · 2026-11-10
- Anthropic's 1,000 agents built their own database tables and split into subteams to work in parallel — RLanceMartin · 2026-11-10
- Hardest Fermat lemma spawned a 2,418-task tree across ~750 agents, 10 levels deep — RLanceMartin · 2026-11-10
- With just a shared database and git, 1,000 agents wrote a kernel-checked proof 7x shorter — RLanceMartin · 2026-11-10
- Anatomy of a 1,000-agent run: sandboxing, blocking classifiers, and offline monitoring — RLanceMartin · 2026-11-10