Interesting!
We're working on a similar solution at UnixShells.com [1]. We built a VMM that forks, and boots, in [1] https://unixshells.com
Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#22It doesn't seem very easy to calculate how much it would cost per month to keep a mostly-idle VM running (for example, with a personal web app). The $20/month plan from exe.dev seems more hobbyist-friendly for that. Maybe that's not the intended use, though?
We're not going after hobbyists. We're building the platform for companies like exe.dev to build on. Thats why its all usage based.
That said, our $50 a month plan can be used as an individual for your coding agents, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#23[dead]
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#24I 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
I disagree (as a sandboxing company).
With respect to the market, every single sandbox sucks. I'm not gonna shit talk competitors but there is not a good sandboxing platform out there yet — including me — compared to where we'll be in 6 months.
We've heard all the platforms have consistent uptime, feature completeness, networking and debugging issues. And in our own platform we're not 1/10ths of the way through solving the requests we've gotten.
Next generation of Agents needs computers, and those computers are gonna look really different than "sandboxes" do today.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#25I’m super interested since it seems like you have given everything a lot of thought and effort but I am not sure I understand it.
When I’m thinking of sandboxes, I’m thinking of isolated execution environments.
What does forking sandboxes bring me? What do your sandboxes in general bring me?
Please take this in the best possible way: I’m missing a use case example that’s not abstract and/or small. What’s the end goal here(
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#26I 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.
It is a mostly pointless exercise if the goal is trying to contain negative impact of AI agents (e.g. OpenClaw).
It is a very necessary building block for many common features that can be steered in a more deterministic way, e.g. "code interpreter" feature for data analysis or file creation like commonly seen in chat web UIs.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I disagree (as a sandboxing company). With respect to the market, every single sandbox sucks. I'm not gonna shit talk competitors but there is not a good sandboxing platform out there yet — including me — compared to where we'll be in 6 months. We've heard all the platforms have consistent uptime, feature completeness, networking and debugging issues. And in our own platform we're not 1/10ths of the way through solvi…
I don't think you're wrong, but if you really want to really re-think the approach, building an orchestration layer for Firecracker like every other company in the space is doing is probably not it.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#28I built something like this at work using plain Docker images. Can you help me understand your value prop a little better?
The memory forking seems like a cool technical achievement, but I don't understand how it benefits me as a user. If I'm delegating the whole thing to the AI anyway, I care more about deterministic builds so that the AI can tackle the problem.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#29I’m super interested since it seems like you have given everything a lot of thought and effort but I am not sure I understand it. When I’m thinking of sandboxes, I’m thinking of isolated execution environments. What does forking sandboxes bring me? What do your sandboxes in general bring me? Please take this in the best possible way: I’m missing a use case example that’s not abstract and/or small. What’s the end goal…
So isolation is correct. Forking a sandbox gives you multiple exact duplicates of isolated environments.
When your coding agent has 10 ideas for what to do, to evaluate them correctly it needs to be able to evaluate them in isolation.
If you're building a website testing agent and halfway down a website, with a form half filled out a session ongoing, etc and it realizes it wants to test 2 things in isolation, forking is the only way.
We also envision this powering the next generation of devcycles "AI Agent, go try these 10 things and tell me which works best". AI forks the environment 10 times, gets 10 exact copies, does the thing in each of them, evaluates it, then takes the best option.
Re: Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents
#30how many seconds to provision are we talking about here? 1 sec vs 60 is a dealbreaker for me, some clarity on that would be nice.