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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

#81

Post by skybrian »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #37
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…

> it will suspend when you put your laptop asleep It is possible to simply not do that. Laptops work just fine as servers. They even have a builtin monitor and UPS.

Yeah but I ‘d rather run it remotely and not run agents on my laptop at all.

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

#82

Post by RussianCow »

aftbit wrote: post #26

Does Codex run its own sandbox? I see that sometimes it runs commands without asking, which then fail for some reason, and it asks to run them again "outside of the sandbox"

Yes, Codex has its own sandbox which you can disable: https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/sandboxing?surface=app

Cursor has something similar. I don't know about Claude Code but I assume it does as well since Anthropic has open sourced their own sandboxing tool.

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

#83

Post by mrbn100ful »

dietdrb wrote: post #76
mrbn100ful wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called https://github.com/features/codespaces or https://codeanywhere.com/ or https://claude.ai/code/

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.

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

#84

Post by matheusmoreira »

croes wrote: post #75
matheusmoreira wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that means you are sharing kernel with the sandboxed agent. Virtualization presents an infinitely smaller attack surface.

Then use SmolVM

I'm already using virtdev, my own solution built on top of QEMU.

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

#87

Post by skybrian »

mswphd wrote: post #33
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…

https://paseo.sh/ supports self-hosting, though I've only used it a mild amount tbh.

It looks like they have the right idea but their workspaces are based on GitHub worktrees rather than separate VM’s.

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

#88

Post by schainks »

vqtska wrote: 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?

There is a reason why VMs even are a thing at all: they can offer better security guarantees than alternatives.

A separate user is a good start but LLM tests themselves show they can cleverly bypass guardrails if they figure out they are in a sandboxed environment of some kind, right?

So, I read those test results as: an LLM is less likely to do something crazy if it thinks it has the whole environment to itself.

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

#89

Post by docheinestages »

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 disposable VMs with premade images and your SSH key. The images can be lightweight or the desktop version with a remote VNC.

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

#90

Post by petesergeant »

einhard wrote: post #73

I am certainly no expert in this space so it is quite possible I'm missing something critical, but what seems to work for me is a Podman image I built on my computer with some basic things I need (using OpenCode, but I imagine any other agent could be used instead): FROM docker.io/archlinux:base RUN pacman -Syu --noconfirm && \ pacman -S --noconfirm \ base-devel \ git \ curl \ uv \ opencode && \ pacman -Scc --noconfi…

This is how I started, and then I wanted to bring along creature comforts, not have to re-auth per box (for subscription models), had some skills I usually wanted to bring, wanted slightly different setups for different stacks, sensibly install multiple agents, import git identity (but not credentials), mount other code folders ro but only for certain projects, etc etc, and ended up with a full Docker wrapper.
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