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Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

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Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#1

Post by benswerd »

We’re Ben and Jacob, cofounders of Freestyle (https://freestyle.sh). We’re building a cloud for Coding Agents.

For the first generation of agents it looked like workflows with minimal tools. 2 years ago we published a package to let AI work in SQL, at that time GPT-4 could write simple scripts. Soon after the first AI App Builders started using AI to make whole websites; we supported that with a serverless deploy system.

But the current generation is going much further, instead of minimal tools and basic serverless apps AI can utilize the full power of a computer (“sandbox”). We’re building sandboxes that are interchangeable with EC2s from your agents perspective, with bonus features:

1. We’ve figured out how to fork a sandbox horizontally without more than a 400ms pause in it. That's not forking the filesystem, we mean forking the whole memory of it. If you’re half way down a browser page with animations running, they’ll be in the same place in all the forks. If you’re running a minecraft server every block and player will be in the same place on the forks. If you’re running a local environment and an error comes up in process that error will be there in all the forks. This works for snapshotting as well, you can save your place and come back weeks later.

2. Our sandboxes start in ~500ms.

Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8b3d294d515442f296aecde1f42f5524

Compared with other sandboxes, our goal is to be the most powerful. We support full Linux + hardware-virtualization, eBPF, Fuse, etc. We run full Debian with multiple users and we use a systemd init instead of runc. Whatever your AI expects to work on debian should work on these vms, and if it doesn’t send a bug report.

In order to make this possible, we’ve moved to our own bare metal racks. Early in our testing we realized that moving VMs across cloud nodes would not have acceptable performance properties. We asked Google Cloud and AWS for a quote on their bare metal nodes and found that the monthly cost was equivalent to the total cost of the hardware so we did that.

Our goal is to build the necessary infrastructure to replicate the human devloop on the massively multi-tenant scale of AI, so these VMs should be as powerful as the ones you’re used to, while also being available to provision in seconds.

Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
freestyle.sh

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#2

Post by n2d4 »

Cool! I've been using your API for running sandboxed JS. Nice to see you also support VMs now.

    > we mean forking the whole memory of it
How does this work? Are you copying the entire snapshot, or is this something fancy like copy-on-write memory? If it's the former, doesn't the fork time depend on the size of the machine?

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#3

Post by benswerd »

n2d4 wrote: post #2

Cool! I've been using your API for running sandboxed JS. Nice to see you also support VMs now. > we mean forking the whole memory of it How does this work? Are you copying the entire snapshot, or is this something fancy like copy-on-write memory? If it's the former, doesn't the fork time depend on the size of the machine?

We're using copy on write with the memory itself. Fork time is completely decoupled from the size of the machine.

Creating snapshots takes a 2-4 second interruption in the VM due to sheer IO that we didn't want here.

Whats especially cool about this approach is not only is fork time O(1) with respect to machine size, but its also O(1) with respect to the amount of forks.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#6

Post by benswerd »

_jayhack_ wrote: post #4

Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?

I'm working on an article deep diving into the differences between all of us. I think the goal of Freestyle is to be the most powerful and most EC2 like of the bunch.

Daytona runs on Sysbox (https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox) which is VM-like but when you run low level things it has issues.

Modal is the only provider with GPU support.

I haven't played around with Blaxel personally yet.

E2B/Vercel are both great hardware virtualized "sandboxes"

Freestyle VMS are built based on the feedback our users gave us that things they expected to be able to do on existing sandboxes didn't work. A good example here is Freestyle is the only provider of the above (haven't tested blaxel) that gives users access to the boot disk, or the ability to reboot a VM.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#8

Post by tomComb »

_jayhack_ wrote: post #4

Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?

And fly.io sprites

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#9

Post by benswerd »

tomComb wrote: post #8
_jayhack_ wrote: post #4

Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?

And fly.io sprites

Fly.io sprites is the most similar to us of the bunch. They do hardware virtualization as well, have comparable start times and are full Linux. What we call snapshots they call checkpoints.

The big pros of Sprites over us is their advanced networking stack and the Fly.io ecosystem. The big cons are that Sprites are incredibly bare bones — they don't have any templating utilities. I've also heard that Sprites sometimes become unavailable for extended periods of time.

The big pros of Freestyle over Sprites is fork, advanced templating, and IMO a better debugging experience because of our structure.

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