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ZDNET's key takeaways
Agent sprawl could mirror the VM explosion era.
Excessive agent agency increases breach blast radius.
Treat AI agents like employees with credentials.
Ever since October, I've been happily vibe-coding a series of apps using Claude Code. Every so often, I would give them an instruction, and they would go off and do my bidding. It was a comfortable collaboration. I could see everything the AI was doing, and I could produce new code at a pace far faster than ever before.
But then Anthropic updated its language model. The key feature was Claude's ability to launch subordinate agents that could simultaneously work on different parts of the problem and communicate with each other. In theory, this was a big technical advance.
In theory.
My entire experience changed. Suddenly, Claude was kicking off four, five, six, seven, even eight agents at once. I had no visibility into what they were all doing. I didn't even have a way to stop them if one or more ran amok. And run amok they sure did.
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