8 ms·
It's so important to remember that unlike code which can be reverted - most file system and application operations cannot. There's no sandboxing snapshot in re
by jryio 9mo ago
It's so important to remember that unlike code which can be reverted - most file system and application operations cannot.
There's no sandboxing snapshot in revision history, rollbacks, or anything.
I expect to see many stories from parents, non-technical colleagues, and students who irreparably ruined their computer.
Edit: most comments are focused on pointing out that version control & file system snapshot exists: that's wonderful, but Claude Cowork does not use it.
For those of us who have built real systems at low levels I think the alarm bells go off seeing a tool like this - particularly one targeted at non-technical users
- Weryj 9mo agoTimeMachine has never been so important.
- greenavocado 9mo agoTimeMachine is worthless trash compared to restic
- bspinner 9mo agoPlease elaborate
- greenavocado 9mo agoIt works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. It's not locked to Apple's ecosystem. You can back up directly to local storage, SFTP, S3, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud, and more. Time Machine is largely limited to local drives or network shares. Restic deduplicates at the chunk level across all snapshots, often achieving better space efficiency than Time Machine's hardlink-based approach. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine. Time Machine encryption is optional. Restic supports append-only mode for protection against ransomware or accidental deletion. It also has a built-in check command to check integrity. Time Machine has a reputation for silent failures and corruption issues that have frustrated users for years. Network backups (to NAS devices) use sparse bundle disk images that are notoriously fragile. A dropped connection mid-backup can corrupt the entire backup history, not just the current snapshot. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+sparse+bundle https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+corruption+spar... Time Machine sometimes decides a backup is corrupted and demands you start fresh, losing all history. Backups can stop working without obvious notification, leaving users thinking they're protected when they're not. https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_time_machine_backup_corrupt_any_way_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/11cod08/apple_tim... The shift from HFS+ to APFS introduced new bugs, and local snapshots sometimes behave unpredictably. https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+restore+problem+APFS+HFS%2B https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+restore+problem... The backup metadata database can grow unwieldy and slow, eventually causing failures. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1cjebor/why_is_time_machine_so_slow_backing_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1cjebor/why_is_time_... https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/w7mkk9/time_machine_backup_incredibly_slow_any_ideas_why/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/w7mkk9/time_machine_... https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1du5nc6/time_machine_is_insanely_slow_os_sonoma_145/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1du5nc6/time_machine... https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/omk7z7/is_a_time_machine_backup_to_an_external_ssd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/omk7z7/is_a_time_machi... https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/ydfman/time_machine_backup_excruciatingly_slow_on_2019/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/ydfman/time_machine_ba... https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1pfmiww/time_machine_backup_absurdly_slow_on_ssd/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1pfmiww/time_machine... https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/lci6z0/time_machine_extremely_slow_15_hours/ https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/lci6z0/time_machine_ex... Time Machine is just garbage for ignorant people.
- BrandoElFollito 9mo agoAlmost all of my backup is around restic, including monitoring of backups (when they fail and when they do not run often enough). It is a very solid setup, with 3 independent backups: local, nearby and far away. Now - it took an awful lot of time to set up (including drinking the wrapper to account for everything). This is advanced IT level. So Time Machine is not for ignorant people, but something everyone can use. (I never used it, no idea if it's good but it has to all last work)
- greenavocado 9mo agoOne works, one loses your data. Oh well. Guess there's a lot of money to be made wrapping it with a paid GUI
- BrandoElFollito 9mo agoI am not sure what you are after, to be honest. Restic is fantastic. And restic is complicated for someone who is not technical. So there is a need to have something that works, even not in an optimal way, that saves people data. Are you saying that Time Machine doe snot backup data correctly? But then there are other services that do. Restic is not for the everyday Joe. And to your point about "ignorant people" - it is as I was saying that you are an ignorant person because you do not create your own medicine, or produce your own electricity, or paint your own paintings, or build your own car. For a biochemist specializing in pharma (or Walt in Breaking Bad :)) you are an ignorant person unable to do the basic stuff: synthetizing paracetamol. It is a piece of cake.
- lijok 9mo agoBut I just want to backup my important files to the cloud
- fragmede 9mo agoArq does it better.
- seunosewa 9mo agoThere's no reason why Claude can't use git to manage the folders that it controls.
- oblio 9mo agoGit isn't good with big files. I wanted to comment more, but this new tool is Mac only for now, so there isn't much of a point.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agogit with lfs There is also xet by huggingface which tries to make git work better with big files
- mhitza 9mo agoToo hard for AI to make crossplatform tools.
- binarymax 9mo agoMost of these files are binary and are not a good fit for git’s graph based diff tracker…you’re basically ending up with a new full sized binary for every file version. It works from a version perspective, but is very inefficient and not what git was built for.
- toddmorey 9mo agoQ: What would prevent them from using git style version control under the hood? User doesn’t have to understand git, Claude can use it for its own purposes.
- twosdai 9mo agoDidn't actually check out the app, but some aspects of application state are hard to serialize, some operations are not reversible by the application. EG: sending an email. It doesn't seem naively trivial to accomplish this, for all apps. So maybe on some apps, but "all" is a difficult thing.
- huflungdung 9mo ago[dead]
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoFor irreversible stuff I like feeding messages into queues. That keeps the semantics clear, and makes the bounds of the reversibility explicit.
- TeMPOraL 9mo agoTool calls are the boundary (or at least one of them).
- nikkwong 9mo agoYou can’t easily snapshot the current state of an OS and restore to that state like with git.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoWell there is cri-u for what its worth on linux which can atleast snapshot the state of an application and I suppose something must be similar available for filesystems as well Also one can simply run a virtual machine which can do that but then the issue becomes in how apps from outside connect to vm inside
- y42 9mo agoIndeed there are and this is no rocket science. Like Word Documents offer a change history, deleted files go to the trash first, there are undo functions, TimeMachine on MacOs, similar features on Windows, even sandbox features.
- fuzzy2 9mo agoTrash is a shell feature. Unless a program explicitly "moves to trash", deleting is final. Same for Word documents. So, no, there is no undo in general. There could be under certain circumstances for certain things.
- Ajedi32 9mo agoEverything on a ZFS/BTRFS partition with snapshots every minute/hour/day? I suppose depending on what level of access the AI has it could wipe that too but seems like there's probably a way to make this work.
- antinomicus 9mo agoThe topic of the discussion is something that parents, grandmas, and non technical colleagues would realistically be able to use.
- Ajedi32 9mo agoA "revert filesystem state to x time" button doesn't seem that hard to use. I'm imagining this as a potential near-term future product implementation, not a home-brewed DIY solution.
- darkwater 9mo agoA filesystemt state in time is VERY complicated to use, if you are reverting the whole filesystem. A granular per-file revert should not be that complicated, but it needs to be surfaced easily in the UI and people need to know aout it (in the case of Cowork I would expect the agent to use it as part of its job, so transparent to the user)
- neocron 9mo agoNot a big problem to make snapshots with lvm or zfs and others. I use it automatically on every update
- fouronnes3 9mo agoI'm not even sure if this is a sarcastic dropbox-style comment at this point.
- lp0_on_fire 9mo agoWhat percentage of non-IT professionals know what zfs/lvm are let alone how to use them to make snapshots?
- neocron 9mo agoI assumed we are talking about IT professionals using tools like claude here? But even for normal people it's not really hard if they manage to leave the cage in their head behind that is ms windows. My father is 77 now and only started using computer abover age 60, never touched windows thanks to me, and has absolutely no problems using (and administrating at this point) it all by himself
- g947o 9mo agoThis doesn't answer the question, like, at all.
- neocron 9mo agodann halt nicht
- shepherdjerred 9mo agoThis tool is aimed towards consumers, not devs
- o_m 9mo agoSo the future is NixOS for non-technical people?
- teekert 9mo agoOr rather ZFS/BTRFS/BchachFS. Before doing anything big I make snapshot, saved me recently when a huge Immich import created a mess, `zfs rollback /home/me@2026-01-12`... And it's like nothing ever happened.
- porkloin 9mo agoYes, and I think we're already seeing that in the general trend of recent linux work toward atomic updates. [bootc](https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/09/24/bootc-getting-started-bootable-containers https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2024/09/24/bootc-gett...) based images are getting a ton of traction. [universal blue](https://universal-blue.org/ https://universal-blue.org/) is probably a better brochure example of how bootc can make systems more resilient without needing to move to declarative nix for the entire system like you do in NixOS. Every "upgrade" is a container deployment, and you can roll back or forward to new images at any time. Parts of the filesystem aren't writeable (which pisses people off who don't understand the benefit) but the advantages for security (isolating more stuff to user space by necessity) and stability (wedged upgrades are almost always recoverable) are totally worth it. On the user side, I could easily see [systemd-homed](https://fedoramagazine.org/unlocking-the-future-of-user-management-with-systemd-homed/ https://fedoramagazine.org/unlocking-the-future-of-user-mana...) evolving into a system that allows snapshotting/roll forward/roll back on encrypted backups of your home dir that can be mounted using systemd-homed to interface with the system for UID/GID etc. These are just two projects that I happen to be interested in at the moment - there's a pretty big groundswell in Linux atm toward a model that resembles (and honestly even exceeds) what NixOS does in terms of recoverability on upgrade.
- alwillis 9mo agoThe first version is for macOS, which has snapshots [1] and file versioning [2] built-in. [1]: https://eclecticlight.co/2024/04/08/apfs-snapshots/ https://eclecticlight.co/2024/04/08/apfs-snapshots/ [2]: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/04/explainer-the-macos-versioning-system/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/09/04/explainer-the-macos-vers...
- cbm-vic-20 9mo agoRSX-11M for the PDP-11 had filesystem versioning back in the early 1980s, if not earlier.
- TurkTurkleton 9mo agoAnd if they were releasing Cowork for RSX-11M, that might be relevant.
- shepherdjerred 9mo agoAre average users likely to be using these features? Most devs at my company don’t even have Time Machine backups
- aixpert 9mo agosnapshots are local Time Machine backups for a few hours which don't need external hard drives and are configured by default I think
- Workaccount2 9mo agoFrequency vs. convenience will determine how big of a deal this is in practice. Cars have plenty of horror stories associated with them, but convenience keeps most people happily driving everyday without a second thought. Google can quarantine your life with an account ban, but plenty of people still use gmail for everything despite the stories. So even if Claude cowork can go off the rails and turn your digital life upside down, as long as the stories are just online or "friend of a friend of a friend", people won't care much.
- yencabulator 9mo agoI mean, we were there before this Cowork feature started exposing more users to the slot machine: "Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268222 "Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database, faked data, told fibs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44632575 "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103532
- Workaccount2 9mo agoThat's what I am saying though. Anecdotes are the wrong thing to focus on, because if we just focused on anecdotes, we would all never leave our beds. People's choices are generally based on their personal experience, not really anecdotes online (although those can be totally crippling if you give in). Car crashes are incredibly common and likewise automotive deaths. But our personal experience keeps us driving everyday, regardless of the stories.
- yencabulator 9mo agoWe as a society put a whole lot of effort into making cars safer. Seatbelts, ABS, airbags.. Claude Code should have airbags too!
- 9mo ago
- heliumtera 9mo agoThere was a couple of posts here on hacker news praising agents because, it seems, they are really good at being a sysadmin. You don't need to be a non-technical user to be utterly fucked by AI.
- TeMPOraL 9mo agoTheoretically, the power drill you're using can spontaneously explode, too. It's very unlikely, but possible - and then it's much more likely you'll hurt yourself or destroy your work if you aren't being careful and didn't set your work environment right. The key for using AI for sysadmin is the same as with operating a power drill: pay at least minimum attention, and arrange things so in the event of a problem, you can easily recover from the damage.
- intended 9mo agoIf a power tool blows up regularly, they get sued or there is a recall. We have far more serious rules at play for harm when it comes to physical goods which we have experience with, than generative tools. There is no reason generative tools should not be governed by similar rules. I suspect people at anthropic would agree with this, because it would also ensure incentives are similar for all major GenAi purveyors.
- jameshart 9mo agoIt’s easy for people to understand that if they point the powerdrill into a wall the failure modes might include drilling through a pipe or a wire, or that the powerdrill should not be used for food preparation or dentistry. People, in general, have no such physical instincts for how using computer programs can go wrong.
- TeMPOraL 9mo agoWhich is in part why rejection of anthropomorphic metaphors is a mistake this time. Treating LLM agents as gullible but extremely efficient idiot savants on a chip, gives pretty good intuition for the failure modes.
- bob1029 9mo agoIn theory the risk is immense and incalculable, but in practice I've never found any real danger. I've run wide open powershell with an OAI agent and just walked away for a few hours. It's a bit of a rush at first but then you realize it's never going to do anything crazy. The base model itself is biased away from actions that would lead to large scale destruction. Compound over time and you probably never get anywhere too scary.
- falcor84 9mo agoOnce upon a time, in the magical days of Windows 7, we had the Volume Shadow Copy Service (aka "Previous Versions") available by default, and it was so nice. I'm not using Windows anymore, and at least part of the reason is that it's just objectively less feature complete than it used to be 15 years ago.
- superjose 9mo agoYeah. I also like Windows, but MS has done a wonderful job to destroy the OS with newer releases. I haven't had to tweak an OS like Win 11 ever.
- akurilin 9mo agoYou make a good point. I imagine that they will eventually add Perforce-style versioning to the product and this issue will be solved.
- hopelite 9mo agoSomewhat related is a concern I have in general as things get more "agentic" and related to the prompt injection concerns; without something like legally bullet-proof contracts, aren't we moving into territory of basically "employing" what could basically be "spies" at all levels from personal (i.e., AI company staff having access to your personal data/prompts/chats) to business/corporate espionage, to domestic and international state level actors who would also love to know what you are working on and what you are thinking/chatting about and maybe what your mental health challenges are that you are working through with an AI chat therapist. I am not even certain if this issue can be solved since you are sending your prompts and activities to "someone else's computer", but I suspect if it is overlooked or hand-waved as insignificant, there will be a time when open, local models will become useful enough to allow most to jettison cloud AI providers. I don't know about everyone else, but I am not at all confident in allowing access and sending my data to some AI company that may just do a rug pull once they have an actual virtual version of your mind in a kind of AI replication. I'll just leave it at that point and not even go into the ramifications of that, e.g., "cybercrimes" being committed by "you", which is really the AI impersonator built based on everything you have told it and provide access to.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kamaal 9mo ago>>I expect to see many stories from parents, non-technical colleagues, and students who irreparably ruined their computer. I do believe the approach Apple is taking is the right way when it comes to user facing AI. You need to reduce AI to being an appliance that does one or at most a few things perfectly right without many controls with unexpected consequences. Real fun is robots. Not sure no one is hurrying up on that end. >>Edit: most comments are focused on pointing out that version control & file system snapshot exists: that's wonderful, but Claude Cowork does not use it. Also in my experience this creates all kinds of other issues. Like going back up a tree creates all kinds of confusions and keeps the system inconsistent with regards to whatever else it is you are doing. You are right in your analysis that many people are going to end up with totally broken systems
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoI hope we see further exploration into immutable/versioned filesystems and databases where we can really let these things go nuts, commit the parts we want to keep, and revert the rest for the next iteration.
- hans0l074 9mo agoIIUC, this is a preview for Claude Max subscribers - I'm not sure we'll find many teachers or students there (unless institutions are offering Max-level enterprise/team subscriptions to such groups). I speculate that most of those who will bother to try this out will be software engineering people. And perhaps they will strengthen this after enough feedback and use cases?
- matt3D 9mo agoPretty much every company I work with uses the desktop sync tools for OneDrive/GoogleDrive/Dropbox etc. It would be madness to work completely offline these days, and all of these systems have version history and document recovery built in.
- Helmut10001 9mo agoI would never use what is proposed by OP. But, in any case, Linux on ZFS that is automatically snapshotted every minute might be (part of) a solution to this dilemma.
- big-chungus4 9mo agoA human can also accidentally delete or mess up some files. The question is whether Claude Cowork is more prone to it.
- machiaweliczny 9mo agoYeah, seems like this could be achieved by using https://github.com/streamich/memfs/blob/master/docs/snapshot/index.md https://github.com/streamich/memfs/blob/master/docs/snapshot... Weird they don't use it - might backfire hard
- Aeolun 9mo agoIf this is like Claude Code for everyone else, shouldn’t it be snapshotting anything it changes so that you can go back to the previous state?