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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

#131

Post by cdata »

mkagenius wrote: post #128
cdata wrote: post #125

If you are a Nix flake enjoyer, I whipped up something similar to this (Claude Code-only right now) based on microvm.nix: https://github.com/cdata/katsuobushi/tree/main/lib/sandbox Some highlights: - Drives Claude Code as a quasi-subagent via "Channels," which supports multi-turn interaction with the host and suspend / resume - Declarative configuration in the flake of exactly what is copied into the VM (besides the…

If you are into nixos, we at InstaVM have just launched[1] nixos based sandboxes. 1. https://instavm.io/blog/nixos-reproducible-dev-environments-...

That's very cool, although AFAICT my hacked-together non-product shares most of the same virtues. Can you upsell it to me a little?

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

#132

Post by riedel »

cdata wrote: post #125

If you are a Nix flake enjoyer, I whipped up something similar to this (Claude Code-only right now) based on microvm.nix: https://github.com/cdata/katsuobushi/tree/main/lib/sandbox Some highlights: - Drives Claude Code as a quasi-subagent via "Channels," which supports multi-turn interaction with the host and suspend / resume - Declarative configuration in the flake of exactly what is copied into the VM (besides the…

Nice I started to vibecode something with bwrap.nix: https://github.com/riedel/nix-opencode-with-mitm (not anywhere near production ready) What I would really want is token injection outside the sandbox and good control over the network, why I tried integrating a mitm proxy outside the sandbox.

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

#133

Post by ttul »

mlnj wrote: post #66
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…

Is file IO a bottleneck now?

A lot of the work that coding agents do requires tons of random access to files, which MacOS is particularly slow at. Not because the hardware is bad, mind you. Mac SSDs are amazing. It’s the file system. Secondly, MacOS supervises processes for security reasons and coding harnesses spawn tons of processes. There is a lot of CPU overhead embedded in that supervision.

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

#134

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #107
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #36

How many of these are there now, a hundred? We get it, you can run an agent in a VM/container/sandbox. What about configuration management & rollbacks? What about the policy engine? What about dynamic credential management? What about the lethal trifecta? A sandbox is the easiest part and doesn't address the others.

Huh. My virtdev project implements nearly all of that... Except credential injection from the host, which turned out to be on my TODO list.

Based on the readme in your project, yours does not include 1) a policy engine, 2) application proxies to limit scope of access to external systems/networks, 3) firewall configuration for commonly accessed package repositories, 4) configuration management, 5) credential management.

You do have some scripts that 'diff' package inventory of the one distro you support, but not a full fledged configuration management system to manage package dependencies, file permissions, services, etc. Technically the user can deploy one using your provisioning hook but since it's not built-in it's another component the user will need to bring with them, which is one more reason they can use any other system that does basic sandboxing. I'm sure it's useful for you, but it doesn't do anything all the other solutions don't already do. You basically made Vagrant but without the useful Vagrantfile and OS-agnosticism.

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

#136

Post by selvakn »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #36

How many of these are there now, a hundred? We get it, you can run an agent in a VM/container/sandbox. What about configuration management & rollbacks? What about the policy engine? What about dynamic credential management? What about the lethal trifecta? A sandbox is the easiest part and doesn't address the others.

shameless plug (im a contributor to): https://github.com/jskswamy/aide/ covers you, with configuration driven through yaml and credential management with sops.

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

#139

Post by mkagenius »

cdata wrote: post #131
mkagenius wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are into nixos, we at InstaVM have just launched[1] nixos based sandboxes. 1. https://instavm.io/blog/nixos-reproducible-dev-environments-...

That's very cool, although AFAICT my hacked-together non-product shares most of the same virtues. Can you upsell it to me a little?

Our nixos sandboxes are mostly a cloud offering at this time. Scale is what we can offer additionally. Have secret injection built in too. I see you have suspend, resume we have the same. We have snapshots and cloning. Startup time is sub second with warm pools - which will go further down when we replace firecracker with Tarit soon.

1. Tarit - https://GitHub.com/instavm/tarit

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