Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 177 posts

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

#91

Post by qznc »

de6u99er wrote: post #55
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?

On my Mac, every sudo requires either my fingerprint or password, and times out immediately.

Colleague recently told me his agent tried to sudo. It failed but it saw that docker with root is available and just used that. I don't quite remember what it did, I think editing something in /etc.

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

#92

Post by jboss10 »

docheinestages wrote: post #89

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 dis…

Gondolin[1] is what you are describing. It's made by the same person who made the Pi coding agent and sends all of the agent's bash into a small QEMU vm.

[1](https://earendil-works.github.io/gondolin/

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

#93

Post by rvz »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #61
vqtska wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things are you even doing that the agent would try to perform a kernel exploit on you? I thought sandboxing is just to protect from the agent accidentally clearing your home directory. Side note, just 6 days ago a Linux VM escape exploit was disclosed.

I'm not worried about the agent at all. The VM is there to prevent it from clobbering files on my real system. I'm worried about supply chain attacks on npm, pip, cargo and everything else. Don't want to get compromised if I install some stupid package. My virtdev project has essentially split my computer into two systems: my "real" trusted system with software coming directly from my Linux distribition's repositorie…

CVE-2026-53359 - https://github.com/V4bel/Januscape/blob/main/assets/write-up...

CVE-2026-43499 - https://nebusec.ai/research/ionstack-part-2/

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

#94

Post by nzoschke »

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…

Another +1 to cloud sandboxes (and exe.dev) vs laptop sandbox.

Runs 24/7 completely air gapped from your laptop.

You also want a service proxy so the sandbox can access GitHub or Stripe without keys accessible to the agent. I haven't seen many of the laptop sandbox tools do this, where exe.dev does it out of the box with their "integrations".

I usually drop my own binary agent coding toolkit inside the sandbox so I have things like a code browsing and review right there in every sandbox too.

https://github.com/housecat-inc/scratch

Like you I also have a Mac Mini I've thought about making into my own 24/7 dev box, but building this vs buying 50 VMs from exe.dev for $20/mo doesn't add up for me.

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

#96

Post by 28304283409234 »

docheinestages wrote: post #89

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 dis…

I use vagrant on a seperate machine in a seperate network. The magic of ssh makes it transparent for me, and I feel pretty sure the agents cannot get to stuff that matters.

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

#97

Post by matheusmoreira »

mrbn100ful wrote: post #45

YAY, let's build the same thing over and over :/ Did you know that before reinventing the wheel, you can ask LLM your requirements, and they can find the most suited already existing tool ?

Yeah, but I explicitly chose to make my own anyway because I wanted to fully own the code and none of the existing solutions worked the way I wanted.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with reinventing the whell. It's entirely possible to do it and end up discovering you've made a better wheel.

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

#98

Post by celrenheit »

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 are two sides to this. The first is security, which plenty of comments already covered. The second, and the real one for me: my tests spin up Docker containers, and I was building a Kubernetes tool (argocd/flux style) that needs a real cluster in the sandbox. In a container that means Docker-in-Docker, which always felt hacky. A VM is just a normal Linux box where Docker and k8s run like they do everywhere else. A separate user can't give you that, it shares your one kernel and whatever's already installed on the host.

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

#100

Post by SoftTalker »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #61
vqtska wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things are you even doing that the agent would try to perform a kernel exploit on you? I thought sandboxing is just to protect from the agent accidentally clearing your home directory. Side note, just 6 days ago a Linux VM escape exploit was disclosed.

I'm not worried about the agent at all. The VM is there to prevent it from clobbering files on my real system. I'm worried about supply chain attacks on npm, pip, cargo and everything else. Don't want to get compromised if I install some stupid package. My virtdev project has essentially split my computer into two systems: my "real" trusted system with software coming directly from my Linux distribition's repositorie…

> npm, pip, cargo and everything else

All that stuff should also go into the agent user's home directory.

Post reply on HN