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Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

tilde.run

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Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically saying there's no need to wear a seatbelt because you've driven thousands of times without an accident. Claude is pretty well behaved, but it's not guaranteed to be safe, especially as you start to hit the gas and relinquish more control. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst and all that. Just because your use case doesn't need sandboxing, doesn't mean there's no need for sandboxing.

I'm not having a debate because I'm quite ignorant of the subject. Just trying to learn from you: wouldn't recoverability and observability suffice instead of sandboxing, if such events are indeed rare? not necessarily for all usecases, but for most?

Yeah, I'm sure the reality is that a basic setup is fine for most casual development. The average user isn't concerned with security and we've basically normalized data breaches. If you have backups, use git, and manually approve Claude's access and actions, that's likely "good enough".

The problem is you start getting comfortable and tired of your workflow getting interrupted when the agent needs more/repeated access. Gradually the permission scope increases, or you decide to take the guards off completely. At this point you have a non-deterministic black box with internet access doing things to your computer. Maybe the agent gets confused and force-pushes git, maybe you load load a malicious plugin, or MCP to github and ingest something hostile. The internet isn't getting kinder, it's basically all-out war behind the scenes, and having your agent do online research is an attack vector. Security is layered, and sandboxing is a layer you can add to mitigate some issues and have piece of mind.

TBH I didn't look too closely at the featured product because I have my own solution already, but it sounds like a versioning filesystem is integrated, which can be really handy. Filesystem snapshots are fast and cheap compared to traditional backup/restore operations. Git is a nice layer for text files, but it's slow and not very good for binary stuff, so if you're working with images or 3d models etc, a versioning FS is really useful.

There are lots of agent use cases beyond individual coding. Maybe you're building a multi-tenant product that let's user agents do stuff and you need an undo feature. That's probably a good case for a sandbox with versioning FS. Maybe you have an agent handling contractual transactions that can't afford to oops. LLM agents are an entirely new computing interface, so we should imagine wide variety of use cases, some of which would likely benefit from a sandbox environment that versions data.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#112
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. What makes this unique is the versioned, composable filesystem. It's built on top of lakeFS ( https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS ) so it scales really well, unlike other solutions that try and do this with Git directly.

Is lakeFS an FS....? Zero mention of FUSE or a kernel module at all in the README.

The title says it's a new filesystem, you either need to use fuse or a kernel module.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#114

I had to dig hard to find this is a SAAS sandbox offering not an actual sandbox (the software i can use locally). Its just wasting peoples time, no one needs a non opensource sandbox. There are now at least 3 apache 2 projects (smolmachines, microsandbox, boxlite) working on sandboxes and at least one of them should be ready for primetime soon.

It's interesting to see this one launch (yes yet another sandbox.. I was getting worried we'd not seen one for a few days)

SlicerVM (est. 2022) is already used for prime time, not "free as in beer" but has pretty reasonable individual plans that include all features. Shares the core code with actuated. (Creator of both speaking here)

Feel free to take a look and see if gives you a little more than the others you mentioned. If not no problems, I realise some folks prefer free stuff.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#115
post #95

Nice work on the website! Building something for the same problem but more so from the perspective of self-hostable stateful sandboxes, and not just the filesystem (see https://bhatti.sh ). What sandbox solution are you using here?

Your landing page looks very similar to OP's! I thought it was the same site!

Not a surprise at all.

If you look at https://slicervm.com you'll see he's copied our terminal animation from the top of the website. Took out a monthly subscription for 1x month, cloned the majority of the UX/DX and way the guest agent works.

Had people reach out and flag it to me and I'm like "yes there's a reason for that"..

I think this is just par for the course in an AI slop world. Nothing to stop people imitating, copying, cloning with a good prompt and partial source / detailed docs available.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#116

Just my two cents: less is more and the first impression matters a lot. I'm saying this because we see a new agent sandbox tool on the front-page almost every day. Most of them have an AI-made landing page design, lots of animations, lots of words. This has become a bad sign for me. I can tell that you put time into it, made a video, and everything, but I guess I'm suffering from some kind of fatigue of having to go…

Anthropic is probably looking at this trend and building something. When released will kill couple of startups.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#117
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your landing page looks very similar to OP's! I thought it was the same site!

Not a surprise at all. If you look at https://slicervm.com you'll see he's copied our terminal animation from the top of the website. Took out a monthly subscription for 1x month, cloned the majority of the UX/DX and way the guest agent works. Had people reach out and flag it to me and I'm like "yes there's a reason for that".. I think this is just par for the course in an AI slop world. Nothing to stop people imitat…

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#118
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. All of these tools promise the world and are so incredibly vague. Actually show me what I can do with it, like hands on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDR8tmes020 - a 2 minute hands-on demo!

I see a lot of negative feedback here, but I don't agree with it. This is really fantastic what you have built, especially for longer running agents that are used repeatedly, in which case the initial investment of giving only the permissions it needs is worth the effort. To that end, ability to combine several agents which have different roles, which are narrowly scoped in terms of permissions, would be a very useful feature. Perhaps you could even have an agent or UI overlay driven by AI, which can quickly scope the permissions for a new agent, so that users don't need to do it manually.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#119

I had to dig hard to find this is a SAAS sandbox offering not an actual sandbox (the software i can use locally). Its just wasting peoples time, no one needs a non opensource sandbox. There are now at least 3 apache 2 projects (smolmachines, microsandbox, boxlite) working on sandboxes and at least one of them should be ready for primetime soon.

It’s like saying no one needs Dropbox because rsync exists, or no one needs HubSpot because Salesforce exists.

Re: Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem

#120
I glanced through the whole documentation, the homepage and the github readmes and still couldn't figure out which OS do they support and how. And this is especially important to know because sandboxing in macOS and Linux have nothing in common.
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