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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

#21

Have you seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892015 and yoloai? https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai Seems like both projects are following very similar approaches.

Funny that they're both written independently and in Go. Sometimes there's just a best way to do things I guess

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

#23
post #15

I still don't understand the point of all these VMs and containers for agents. Just create a separate user on your machine without sudo privileges, switch to it in your terminal and run all the agents you want without it being able to reach your files. What am I missing?

you can also simply use Landlock and bwrap on Linux. Pi even has a plugin for that https://pi.dev/packages/pi-landstrip

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

#25
Yet another one, only I wrote this one, so I prefer it: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre

You might prefer byre's simplicity, transparency, and ease of reasoning about: one local container, explicit access grants, readable generated Docker, and a workflow that stays close to normal development rather than introducing a larger sandbox platform. It's also very very easy to eject from if you want to stop using it.

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

#27
post #15

I still don't understand the point of all these VMs and containers for agents. Just create a separate user on your machine without sudo privileges, switch to it in your terminal and run all the agents you want without it being able to reach your files. What am I missing?

am I doing that once per project, or?

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

#28
post #15

I still don't understand the point of all these VMs and containers for agents. Just create a separate user on your machine without sudo privileges, switch to it in your terminal and run all the agents you want without it being able to reach your files. What am I missing?

Well, for one, Debian and Debian-based distros make your home directory readable by everyone by default.

Security is riddled by traps. If you can afford best possible level of isolation, why not do it?

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

#29
post #15

I still don't understand the point of all these VMs and containers for agents. Just create a separate user on your machine without sudo privileges, switch to it in your terminal and run all the agents you want without it being able to reach your files. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact you'd be sharing a kernel with the sandboxed agent. Virtualization presents an infinitely smaller attack surface.

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

#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 self-hosting. I have a Mac Mini that I don’t really use much.

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