YHK - yet another hacker news clone

FYI VSCode's SSH Agent is a godsend for remote development - the "disadvantages" that Fly lists are part of its advantages. I've worked in several teams that have made extensive use of the extension, and it's never been an issue. You can restrict SSH access arbitrarily to ensure whatever security or access guardrails you need.

vs.

> The agent runs over port-forwarded SSH. It establishes a WebSockets connection back to your running VSCode front-end. The underlying protocol on that connection can: Wander around the filesystem; - Edit arbitrary files; Launch its own shell PTY processes; Persist itself.

So... basically the same things that Tramp could do as well?

> In security-world, there’s a name for tools that work this way. I won’t say it out loud, because that’s not fair to VSCode, but let’s just say the name is murid in nature.

Yeah, it's called RAT, and an ur-example of it is SSH itself (especially when allowed to run a shell remotely), so... not sure why are you freaking out.

I mean, I'd probably prefer if VS Code simply ran ed/vim remotely, but both of those editors can invoke shell anyhow so... eh?

The problem is that it appears to do this via an AI Agent. This broadens the security concerns significantly.

I found this closing sentence utterly delightful, particularly in an age of endlessly filtering every piece of text I read on the internet through a mental "was this written by Claude, Codex, or (just possibly) a human?" filter.

kudos

- neovim

- in VS Code [1]

- in the browser

Cloud VM runs the built-in `code serve-web` command, over Tailscale using `tailscale serve`. No SSH. Extensions work. No extensions run locally (with SSH some extensions have to run locally on your machine).

I’m trying to see how little I can run on my local machine. VS Code over SSH is a good step in that direction, but there’s more attack surface if SSH is misconfigured, plus risk of an extension getting compromised.

I expected the added layers (neovim, through an extension, inside VS Code, over the web) to be slow, but so far it works surprisingly well.

[1] https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim

    Wander around the filesystem
    Edit arbitrary files
    Launch its own shell PTY processes
    Persist itself

Wait, could someone clarify which machine is being referred to here?

So in the author's setup, he runs VSCode (i.e. the front-end) on his dev laptop, which he wants to keep free of direct LLM access.

VSCode connects via ssh to a dedicated "sandbox" machine on which the LLM will be free to do whatever it wants (mostly).

VSCode realizes this the Microsoft way, by using the ssh connection to install VSCode Server on the sandbox machine - the "backend" - and communicating through it via a websocket connection.

So then, what happens? If the websocket connection allows the front-end to run arbitrary commands on the sandbox machine, this wouldn't be very exciting: The front-end already has an ssh connection and a massive server process that can do the same - and the entire purpose of the sandbox machine is to run arbitrary, untrusted commands without harm.

But the article says the websocket connection goes "back to your running VSCode front-end". So does that mean things are reversed? I.e. the agent/harness runs in the server on the sandox machine but for some reason has this websocket connection that also lets it run arbitrary commands on the dev laptop?

Is that it? That would be truly insane!