I know there are VM solutions, but I've been happy with a separate OS user (named `claude`).
He has similar dotfiles to mine, but no secrets. My own home directory is 0700. He has his own ssh key that I added to my github profile, but it's password-protected, and I push/pull for him. He has his own Postgres (non-superuser!) {development,test} {users,databases}.
It's as if he were another developer on the project. If he needs something run with sudo, he asks me. Often we can both work on something in parallel. Unix was supposed to be a multi-user system after all.
A trick I use a lot is that many of his git repos have an extra remote, like this:
paul ssh://paul@localhost/~/src/example (fetch)
paul ssh://paul@localhost/~/src/example (push)
That makes it easy to collaborate on things I'm not ready to share.
I'm pretty comfortable with this setup.
I do worry about Linux privilege escalation bugs. I don't trust an AI to understand that exploiting vulns is not acceptable. (I can't help but recall that at my first job I may have misused vim's :! feature to broaden my sudo powers, which were officially limited to editing httpd.conf, when I needed something in a hurry. . . .) I find myself manually upgrading packages more often these days, despite automatic security updates. I don't think Opus would go to the trouble of looking up security vulns, but maybe Fable would, and there have been a lot lately. Maybe some future model will just take it upon itself to find new ones. Or install a keylogger to learn the ssh key password.
But a separate user is nearly the most paranoid setup I've heard of, excepting only a separate machine. So I also question whether I'm sacrificing too much speed/convenience. But really it's still very convenient. I think it's a good way of being efficient but responsible.
If other people see holes, I'd be happy to hear about them.
He has similar dotfiles to mine, but no secrets. My own home directory is 0700. He has his own ssh key that I added to my github profile, but it's password-protected, and I push/pull for him. He has his own Postgres (non-superuser!) {development,test} {users,databases}.
It's as if he were another developer on the project. If he needs something run with sudo, he asks me. Often we can both work on something in parallel. Unix was supposed to be a multi-user system after all.
A trick I use a lot is that many of his git repos have an extra remote, like this:
That makes it easy to collaborate on things I'm not ready to share.I'm pretty comfortable with this setup.
I do worry about Linux privilege escalation bugs. I don't trust an AI to understand that exploiting vulns is not acceptable. (I can't help but recall that at my first job I may have misused vim's :! feature to broaden my sudo powers, which were officially limited to editing httpd.conf, when I needed something in a hurry. . . .) I find myself manually upgrading packages more often these days, despite automatic security updates. I don't think Opus would go to the trouble of looking up security vulns, but maybe Fable would, and there have been a lot lately. Maybe some future model will just take it upon itself to find new ones. Or install a keylogger to learn the ssh key password.
But a separate user is nearly the most paranoid setup I've heard of, excepting only a separate machine. So I also question whether I'm sacrificing too much speed/convenience. But really it's still very convenient. I think it's a good way of being efficient but responsible.
If other people see holes, I'd be happy to hear about them.