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

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

#111

Post by matheusmoreira »

rvz wrote: post #93
matheusmoreira wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Patched in Linux 7.1.3, which happens to be the exact kernel version I'm running. Update your kernels, folks.

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

#112

Post by celrenheit »

ttul wrote: post #63

And, make coding harnesses run 20x faster at many multi-processing and file operations by running the coding harness itself inside of Linux instead of MacOS…

That's actually how clawk runs it: the agent process (claude/codex) runs inside the Linux guest on a PTY, not on macOS

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

#113

Post by Retr0id »

vqtska wrote: post #51
killerstorm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privilege escalation (e.g. setuid), world-readable files might contain sensitive data, world-writeable files, unrestricted network access (including access to all locally running services)... If you have fully patched system without zero-days and it's configured in a perfect way, then, sure... Container is quite like a "separate user" except you can explicitly define what it can access. (Even if all your daemons have…

Sure, if you assume the agent will be hostile on you. I thought it's just so the agent doesn't accidentally rm -rf / on you

There are documented instances of LLMs casually using LPEs in order to achieve an objective: https://xcancel.com/sluongng/status/2060746160558543217

And that's without anything like prompt injection happening.

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

#115

Post by arjie »

I just use kubernetes with a single PVC for the Claude folders. Works like a charm. Don’t need too much else. You can then start separate pods with different PVCs to different folders. Lives on a server, I can manage the auth by just making each pod description different.

Honestly works fine and you can use /rc to talk to them over the Claude phone app.

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

#117

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

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…

quickemu[0] is sort of amazing for these type of use cases actually. I feel like I could use it more for this type of stuff.

[0]: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

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

#118

Post by celrenheit »

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…

[dead]

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

#120

Post by kerblang »

djha-skin wrote: post #109

Can't I just use a `docker run` command to run claude and bind in the current directory into the docker container?

Check the 2nd section of article https://github.com/clawkwork/clawk#why-a-vm

A lot of people would yell "docker isn't secure!" but if you're running Docker on MacOS (and Windows, I think) you're already running a Linux VM. But if you really wanna let your agent YOLO their way along, Docker is kinda restrictive, so that a full VM lets it install things, start services, and so on.

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