Living Dangerously with Claude

Summary

Living dangerously with Claude 22nd October 2025 I gave a talk last night at Claude Code Anonymous in San Francisco, the unofficial meetup for coding agent enthusiasts. I decided to talk about a dichotomy I’ve been struggling with recently. On the one hand I’m getting enormous value from running coding agents with as few restrictions as possible. On the other hand I’m deeply concerned by the risks that accompany that freedom. Below is a copy of my slides, plus additional notes and links as an annotated presentation. # I’m going to be talking about two things this evening... # Why you should always use --dangerously-skip-permissions. (This got a cheer from the room full of Claude Code enthusiasts.) # And why you should never use --dangerously-skip-permissions. (This did not get a cheer.) # --dangerously-skip-permissions is a bit of a mouthful, so I’m going to use its better name, “YOLO mode”, for the rest of this presentation. Claude Code running in this mode genuinely feels like a completely different product from regular, default Claude Code. The default mode requires you to pay constant attention to it, tracking everything it does and actively approving changes and actions every few steps. In YOLO mode you can leave Claude alone to solve all manner of hairy problems while you go and do something else entirely. I have a suspicion that many people who don’t appreciate the value of coding agents have never experienced YOLO mode in all of its glory. I’ll show you three projects I completed with YOLO mode in just the past 48 hours. # I wrote about this one at length in Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an NVIDIA Spark via brute force using Claude Code. I wanted to try the newly released DeepSeek-OCR model on an NVIDIA Spark, but doing so requires figuring out how to run a model using PyTorch and CUDA, which is never easy and is a whole lot harder on an ARM64 device. I SSHd into the Spark, started a fresh Docker container and told Claude Code to figure it out. It took 40 ...