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Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

agent-safehouse.dev

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Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Linux, not much. On a Mac, quite a bit.

Like mostly apple services such as iMessage? I’m asking honestly, not snarky! I don’t think performance is a big factor for agentic hyjinx.

Yes, anything Apple platform development

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#112
post #61

The challenge I'm finding with sandboxes like this is evaluating them in comparison to each other. This looks like a competent wrapper around sandbox-exec. I've seen a whole lot of similar wrappers emerging over the past few months. What I really need is help figuring out which ones are trustworthy. I think this needs to take the form of documentation combined with clearly explained and readable automated tests. Most…

If you're looking for one better documented and tested, you might like https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#113
post #102

But... why not just run macOS in a VM? If/since AI agents work continuously, it seems like running macOS in a VM (via the virtualization framework directly) is the most secure solution and requires a lot less verification than any sandboxing script. (Critical feature: no access to my keychain.) AI agents are not at all like container deploys which come and go with sub-second speed, and need to be small enough that yo…

1 limitation is Apple Virtualisation does not offer USB passthrough for connecting to iPhones for iOS development.

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#114

This is just a wrapper around sandbox-exec. It's nice that there are a ton of presets that have been thought out, since 90% of wielding sandbox-exec is correctly scoping it to whatever the inner environment requires (the other 90% is figuring out how sandbox-exec works). I like that it's just a shell script. I do wish that there was a simple way to sandbox programs with an overlay or copy-on-write semantics (or bette…

I took a more paranoid approach to sandboxing agents. They can do whatever they want inside their container, and then I choose which of their changes to apply outside as commits:

    ┌─ YOLO shell ──────────────────────┬─ Outer shell ─────────────────────┐
    │                                   │                                   │
    │ yoloai new myproject . -a         │                                   │
    │                                   │                                   │
    │ # Tell the agent what to do,      │                                   │
    │ # have it commit when done.       │                                   │
    │                                   │ yoloai diff myproject             │
    │                                   │ yoloai apply myproject            │
    │                                   │ # Review and accept the commits.  │
    │                                   │                                   │
    │ # ... next task, next commit ...  │                                   │
    │                                   │ yoloai apply myproject            │
    │                                   │                                   │
    │                                   │ # When you have a good set of     │
    │                                   │ # commits, push:                  │
    │                                   │ git push                          │
    │                                   │                                   │
    │                                   │ # Done? Tear it down:             │
    │                                   │ yoloai destroy myproject          │
    └───────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────┘
Works with Docker, Seatbelt, and Tart backends (I've even had it build an iOS app inside a seatbelt container).

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#115

A way to run claude code inside a apple container - $ container system start $ container run -d --name myubuntu ubuntu:latest sleep infinity $ container exec myubuntu bash -c "apt-get update -qq && apt-get install -y openssh-server" $ container exec myubuntu bash -c " apt-get install -y curl && curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_lts.x | bash - && apt-get install -y nodejs " $ container exec myubuntu npm inst…

Lume is also a nice wrapper around it

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#116

I wonder why you believe that running agents locally is the best approach. For most people, having agents operate remotely is more effective because the agent can stay active without your local machine needing to remain powered on and connected to the internet 24/7.

It’s nice to debug Apple platform projects immediately

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#118
post #61

The challenge I'm finding with sandboxes like this is evaluating them in comparison to each other. This looks like a competent wrapper around sandbox-exec. I've seen a whole lot of similar wrappers emerging over the past few months. What I really need is help figuring out which ones are trustworthy. I think this needs to take the form of documentation combined with clearly explained and readable automated tests. Most…

If you're looking for one better documented and tested, you might like https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

I'm having trouble understanding what makes this: "better documented and tested"? Care to elaborate how the testing was done? What are the differences?

Re: Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents

#119

While we have `sandbox-exec` in macOS, we still don't have a proper Docker for macOS. Instead, the current Docker runs on macOS as a Linux VM which is useful but only as a Linux machine goes. Having real macOS Docker would solve the problem this project solves, and 1001 other problems.

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