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Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

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Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#11

Post by knowsuchagency »

benswerd wrote: post #9
tomComb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sometime…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#12

Post by rsyring »

_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'd also be interested in a comparison with exe.dev which I'm currently using.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#13

Post by benswerd »

knowsuchagency wrote: post #11
benswerd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sometime…

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!

Self hosting can be doable for constant small/medium size workloads

You can handroll a lot with: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox?tab=readme-ov-file https://gvisor.dev https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap?tab=readme-ov-file

For hardware virtualized machines it much harder but you can do it via: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor

Freestyle/other providers will likely provide better debugging experience but thats something you can probably get past for a lot of workloads.

The time when you/anyone should think about Freestyle/anyone is when the load spikes/the need to create hundreds of VMs in short spikes shows up, or when you're looking for some of the more complex feature sets any given provider has built out (forks, GPUs, network boundaries, etc).

I also highly recommend self hosting anything you do outside of your normal VPC. Sandboxes are the biggest possible attack surface and it is a feature of us that we're not in your cloud; If we mess up security your app is still fine.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#14

Post by indigodaddy »

benswerd wrote: post #13
knowsuchagency wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I'm predominantly a self-hoster, but I think your product makes a lot of sense for a wide variety of users and businesses. I'm excited to try out freestyle!

Self hosting can be doable for constant small/medium size workloads You can handroll a lot with: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox?tab=readme-ov-file https://gvisor.dev https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap?tab=readme-ov-file For hardware virtualized machines it much harder but you can do it via: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/ https://github.com/cloud-hypervisor/cloud-hypervisor Freestyle/oth…

This is what I do (my project) for self hosting on a VPS/server:

https://GitHub.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

Also I'm a huge proponent of exe.dev

Obviously your service/approach is different than exe, more like sprites but like you said more targeted/opinionated to AI coding/sandboxing tasks it looks like. Interesting space for sure!

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#16

Post by MarcelinoGMX3C »

The technical challenges in getting memory forking to deliver those sub-second start and fork times are significant. I've seen the pain of trying to achieve that level of state transfer and rapid provisioning. While "EC2-like" gets the point across for many, going bare metal reveals the practical limits of cloud virtualization for high-performance, complex workloads like these. It shows a real understanding of where cloud abstraction helps and where it just adds overhead.

The cost argument for owning the hardware for this specific use case also makes sense, considering the scale these agent environments will demand. Also worth noting, sandboxes are effectively an open attack surface; architecting them not to be in your main VPC is a sound security decision from the start.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#18

Post by siva7 »

I have so many interesting problems on Ai, sandboxing isn't one of them. It's a pointless excercise yet disproportionately so many people love to to do this. Probably because sandboxing doesn't feel as magic as Agents itself and more like the old times of "traditional" software development.

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#19

Post by iterateoften »

siva7 wrote: post #18

I have so many interesting problems on Ai, sandboxing isn't one of them. It's a pointless excercise yet disproportionately so many people love to to do this. Probably because sandboxing doesn't feel as magic as Agents itself and more like the old times of "traditional" software development.

Yeah, idk I guess it’s interesting if you are an engineer looking for something to do,

But like I see multiple sandbox for agents products a week. Way too saturated of a market

Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

#20

Post by benswerd »

borakostem wrote: post #15

[flagged]

So this is an ongoing optimization point, no perfect solution exists. Freestyle VMs work with a network namespace and virtual ethernet cable going into them, so they all think they are the same IP.

This means that while complex protocol connections like remote Postgres can break in the forks, stuff like Websockets just automatically reconnects.

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