2026-11-04 - Code.talks

Coding agents are unsafe, just like a campfire in a drought. OpenAi's agent hacking Hugging Face shows what these agents are trained to do. And even a safety-tuned agent can be hijacked by any external content (pull request, external library, or website), which can inject prompts and lead to persisted compromise. Safety training and prompt-injection classifiers can lower the odds, but as Simon Willison puts it: "In application security, 99% is a failing grade." In this talk, I break down the Hugging Face attack, map the current state of agent security, and lay out a sandbox taxonomy with seven layers of defense. I'll show why built-in sandboxes, container isolation, and regular VMs leave serious gaps, and what today's best sandboxes do differently. You'll leave knowing how to let coding agents work on your code while enforcing the principle of least privilege.