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Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

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Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#151

With agentjail ( https://github.com/LuD1161/agentjail ), I've tried to contain coding agents in os-native sandboxes (sbpl for macos and similarly for linux, Protocol aware network proxy coming soon Then you can match a DSL and block particular network requests. This ensures you no longer fear --dangerously-skip-permissions and stop babysitting agents What else would you want to see in this project? Please star the re…

> What else would you want to see in this project?

Absence of spamming mentions of it everywhere.

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#152
post #150

So many of these agent sandboxing solutions now. Don’t people search for existing solutions anymore?

I'm afraid not. My impression is, most are just prompting for the tool they need right now, accept bugs and maybe even security gaps, but save time and pain not searching for an established tool. Which is fine and understandable for private things. But I wonder, how often this happens in professional environments. But maybe I'm just wrong... I have not seen any resarch or evaluation for this claims. Would be interesting, though

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#153
post #92

I think the most secure setup, though not so convenient for the average user, is a separate machine with QEMU/KVM. The machine should be isolated adequately, such that even if compromised, it shouldn't be able to cause damage or gain access to other machines. Additionally, a proxy server on your machine or elsewhere could hide sensitive credentials. A helper binary on your computer would then control spawning new dis…

Gondolin[1] is what you are describing. It's made by the same person who made the Pi coding agent and sends all of the agent's bash into a small QEMU vm. [1]( https://earendil-works.github.io/gondolin/

He described a separate machine where the execution and context would be hosted, not local sandboxes. Did I misunderstand how Gondolin works?

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#154

With agentjail ( https://github.com/LuD1161/agentjail ), I've tried to contain coding agents in os-native sandboxes (sbpl for macos and similarly for linux, Protocol aware network proxy coming soon Then you can match a DSL and block particular network requests. This ensures you no longer fear --dangerously-skip-permissions and stop babysitting agents What else would you want to see in this project? Please star the re…

> What else would you want to see in this project? Absence of spamming mentions of it everywhere.

You mean, I should stop posting much about it ? Is it too aggressive posting Am sorry about that.

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#155

With agentjail ( https://github.com/LuD1161/agentjail ), I've tried to contain coding agents in os-native sandboxes (sbpl for macos and similarly for linux, Protocol aware network proxy coming soon Then you can match a DSL and block particular network requests. This ensures you no longer fear --dangerously-skip-permissions and stop babysitting agents What else would you want to see in this project? Please star the re…

It seems like your approach depends on figuring out what the command is doing, classifying it into three tiers (deny/ask/approve) and then letting the agent run its command depending on that classification. Is that right?

Hey thanks for the question. I would like to answer it in a more descriptive manner with an example later.

Classifying a command can be a bit of a misnomer because it has two inherent problems:

1. You need a classifier. That means the security boundary becomes “can I trick or bypass the classifier?” Whether it is a smaller model or a pile of regexes, it will eventually have edge cases.

2. The token economics do not work, and it also needs to be fast. I do not want an eval evaluating another eval for every command.

So the approach I took is closer to how we normally build security systems: secure defaults and deterministic boundaries.

For example, to protect secrets, AgentJail can block access to paths like `~/.ssh`, `~/.aws/credentials`, `.env`, etc. at the OS level.

The OS is the deterministic boundary here. The ring-0 enforcement layer.

The more interesting problem is network access. You may genuinely want the agent to debug a production Kubernetes cluster, inspect an AWS resource, or query a production database. A blanket network deny would make the agent useless.

For that, I am taking a protocol-aware DSL approach. Something like:

``` deny if { request.host == "api.github.com" request.method == "POST" startswith(request.path, "/repos/") endswith(request.path, "/git/refs") }

ask if { request.host == "kubernetes.default.svc" request.method == "DELETE" }

allow if { request.host == "api.github.com" request.method == "GET" } ```

So instead of trying to classify whether a command is “dangerous,” the policy describes exactly which resources and operations are allowed, denied, or require approval.

The agent can still be probabilistic. The enforcement boundary should not be.

Does that answer to your question?

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#156

Neat, could it leverage https://github.com/apple/container

It was leveraging apple container in the first versions. They have the same foundation VZ (Virtualization.framework), build one container per VM. The reason I stayed with raw VZ instead of apple container is the network filtering feature

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#157

If the agent is running on your machine, it will suspend when you put your laptop asleep. I prefer using a remote Linux VM to let the coding agent keep working. I’m quite happy with exe.dev for this. My laptop is asleep upstairs but I have an agent coding away in a browser tab on the tablet I’m using. I could also check on it from my phone. But it might also be nice if a setup similar to exe.dev were available for se…

Another +1 to cloud sandboxes (and exe.dev) vs laptop sandbox. Runs 24/7 completely air gapped from your laptop. You also want a service proxy so the sandbox can access GitHub or Stripe without keys accessible to the agent. I haven't seen many of the laptop sandbox tools do this, where exe.dev does it out of the box with their "integrations". I usually drop my own binary agent coding toolkit inside the sandbox so I h…

> but building this vs buying 50 VMs from exe.dev for $20/mo doesn't add up for me.

Assuming they never raise their prices (which they almost certainly will), you'll pay $240 per year for this. For that price you could pick up a second hand Mac mini today, though not bleeding edge I guess.

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#158

This is the right idea IMO but I don't want to trust a third party tool for it either (no offense OP!). Ever since I started running coding agents with shell access I've jailed them inside of VMs. Since I run Linux I can just use incus[0] for the VM management layer. It's extremely simple, and you can vibe code a shell script to customize your workflow in a few minutes. [0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

No offense taken! Curious what your actual setup looks like, and whether you do any network filtering on the incus VMs?

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#159
Really cool project. It's fascinating to see more developers pushing back against the complexity of modern container orchestrators.

This open-sourced project called Containarium (https://github.com/FootprintAI/Containarium) recently did with a very similar philosophy: keeping container environments lightweight, simple, and highly portable.

also support MCP and eBPF for convience and security too.

Re: Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop

#160

I think the most secure setup, though not so convenient for the average user, is a separate machine with QEMU/KVM. The machine should be isolated adequately, such that even if compromised, it shouldn't be able to cause damage or gain access to other machines. Additionally, a proxy server on your machine or elsewhere could hide sensitive credentials. A helper binary on your computer would then control spawning new dis…

I agree with this, virtual machines are invented to solve the sandboxing/multi-tenant issues. This is why ec2 and the likes all sell you access to virtual machines (dividing up their underlying hardware).

does eBPF be serving for security enough? ec2 is heavy in terms of cost while containarium (https://github.com/FootprintAI/Containarium) can achieve both, safe & cheap.
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