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WSJ's The Journal podcast examines hands-free driving technology, with reporter Ryan Felton investigating how Ford's BlueCruise system was rolled out and documenting cases where driver confusion over its limitations led to crashes.
Hadley Wickham surveys why tightly-scoped tools don't scale for coding agents, and walks through three layers of protection — explicit permission prompts, OS-level sandboxing, and a secondary LLM safety review — explaining the tradeoffs and failure modes of each.
The current state of the art described here — sandbox by default, then LLM review for anything the sandbox rejects — is what Posit Assistant just implemented. The permission-prompt approach is dismissed as security theatre: approval fatigue means users click yes without scrutiny. The narrowly-scoped safe tool approach fails for a different reason: agents perform better with fewer, more general tools than a large menu of limited ones.