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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12349 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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The tooling it used was just bash, which it used for a container escape via the filesystem, which got it access to the runner's source code, which it analyzed to find where it was pulling eval cases from, which it then looked up, as they were stored in an overly open S3 bucket (yes, all very embarrassing). Also had access to some other tools that didn't play a role.

The prompt was something roughly as simple as "diagnose why VM abcd is malfunctioning."

I'm assuming some sort of file-system mounting being adjacent to the sandbox and exposed so that the bash commands list it, and then it just read the runner files?

I don't work in the Agentic-side of AI/ML, so I have some follow on questions for my understanding, if you don't mind humoring me? Is this a locally hosted LLM where you have access to the system prompts? Or the Harness's prompts? It feels like the system prompts are informing more behavior than just the task prompt of "diagnose why VM abcd is malfunctioning."?

My Thoughts:

  • Something like "Solve this problem, write a series of steps to diagnose it"
  • LLM gives steps: I should determine the current directory. I should list files. I should inspect the entry point. I should read the configuration.
  • The LLM is then prompted by the harness during each step it output
  • While executing a "find the current directory/file structure" command, the runner's file system is exposed.
  • Harness executes commands to read it, pipes that to LLM
  • LLM finds hard coded S3 bucket address and executes a command to read it.
  • Solution

Is that how this essentially works?

file-system mounting being adjacent to the sandbox and exposed so that the bash commands list it

Yep.

Is that how this essentially works?

Pretty much (though, it's the harness that executes the S3 read, just to be pedantic). The particular context of this work I was doing was comparative evals of different agent harnesses; I've only got easy access to my own team's harness code and prompts. Claude Code, for what it's worth, was the cheater.

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