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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

#161

Post by hsin003 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #121

I was using VMs for agents, but wanted something lighter and faster, so I made flar, which bubblewraps the agent, its config/history and the project directory. The agent runs in your usual environment but has no access to anything other than what it's been explicitly granted, short-circuiting prompt injections (or intentional secret exfiltration on the part of the agent or model) as well as any supply chain exploits…

have you tried lxc + eBPF? the former allows you to have lighter & faster (share kernel) and the latter gives you security. that is what we do for containarium.

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

#162

Post by fragmede »

mrbn100ful wrote: post #83
dietdrb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the products you mentioned support macOS environments needed by iOS/tvOS/etc developers. (CodeAnywhere went out of business) Bitrise has been doing macOS VMs for CI for 10 years, so we extended the existing product to this use-case.

I guess you have macOS, but that just it.

But that's the it!

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

#163

Post by celrenheit »

skybrian wrote: post #30

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…

Local first is also a feature, for work you often can't run company code on a remote VM that isn't company owned. Remote dev envs are on the roadmap though, that's one of the reasons why I designed the declarative clawk.mod manifest

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

#164

Post by jboss10 »

binary132 wrote: post #153
jboss10 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Gondolin gives you that. Lightweight micro-VMs (QEMU by default, optional libkrun backend) boot in under a second on your Mac or Linux machine. The network stack and virtual filesystem are implemented entirely in JavaScript, giving you complete programmatic control over what the sandbox can access and what secrets it can use.

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

#165

Post by SwellJoe »

hsin003 wrote: post #161
SwellJoe wrote: post #121

I was using VMs for agents, but wanted something lighter and faster, so I made flar, which bubblewraps the agent, its config/history and the project directory. The agent runs in your usual environment but has no access to anything other than what it's been explicitly granted, short-circuiting prompt injections (or intentional secret exfiltration on the part of the agent or model) as well as any supply chain exploits…

have you tried lxc + eBPF? the former allows you to have lighter & faster (share kernel) and the latter gives you security. that is what we do for containarium.

I used lxc many years ago and used to support it in my company's products, but for this use case, bubblewrap is the obvious answer. It's exactly the right balance of isolation and simplicity. Any full container or VM thing is much heavier than a namespace with some bind mounts, which is what bubblewrap does.

I started out implementing it with podnan, but that's also far too heavy and complicated, as you need to equip it for your specific development needs. With bubblewrap (and, thus, flar) you gave your usual environment, the whole OS mounted read only, but anything sensitive in your home or other dirs that might be sensitive is unreachable.

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

#166

Post by hsin003 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #124

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/

containarium did the same thing with lxc as a container isolation and use eBPF for network safeguard. https://github.com/FootprintAI/Containarium
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