I'm amazed reading that anybody would even consider doing that.
Said alternate system is a bunch of Python scripts, an sqlite database, and a file containing various API keys to read and write to other company systems; it runs on a dedicated virtual machine.
I share all the code I produce to the other team. But yesterday I found out that the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine, without my knowledge or consent (which was bad enough), and that the other team gave access to Claude, which has bean roaming free for a while now, on that production machine.
I've thrown a big fit over this; I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.
> the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine
It's not your production machine. It's the company's production machine. Always expect the company to do whatever it wants with its machine, and use the machine accordingly.
That someone would let an agent run on it at any time, read what's there, and possibly modify the code or stop a process, without even informing me, is what I find problematic, to say the least.
It's true, that the employer can't just enter your machine to look at your personal info just because they feel like it, but they can access it for work related reasons to access work related info, if they have just cause, like a security incident for example.
Ultimately, it's the company's machine, on the company's network, inside the company's premises, on the company's time, so the company can definitely access it for a business use case if they need to, typically with a notification to you to prepare it by removing private info from it or off the screen.
Now if you happen to put your private info there because you're sloppy, and your private info gets vacuumed by accident by IT's mass ingestion of work related data, then you have the right to tell them to delete your private info and they have to comply. That's where the privacy comes in, but it's on you to avoid storing private info on company property, because if it ends up ingested by accident then it's still on you, not your employer if they ingest it by accident.
But I gotta ask, just how hard is it to avoid putting your personal info on company property?
I expect that I can be relocated to another office with a month of advance notice. Also cleanup, fire security check and fixing water leakage while I'm not there.
I don't expect that someone else will provide the keys of "my" office to the biology department when they have to keep a few sheeps during the weekend.
Your employer has gone beyond testing in prod to vibecoding live in prod, secrets included. Yes that's completely insane. Perhaps this exact mentality is how the primary system wound up broken in the first place?
People have wildly different risk calculators.
Beyond that, access to logins enables buying things on Amazon, sending emails to everyone you know, registering domain names and spinning up servers, stock trading, etc.
When a couple thousand dollars worth of perishable food shows up on your doorstep, what then? Not everything on amazon can be returned.
If not: still better than giving ai your password vault. I’m not saying it is a good idea to let ai buy from Amazon. I am saying that giving ai access to your password vault is still a superset of letting ai buy from Amazon.