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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

#31

Post by matheusmoreira »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #14
matheusmoreira wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I developed a VM project just like this one. Asked Fable to stress test it and try to break out of containment, and to my surprise it didn't manage to. Fable didn't get downgraded to Opus either, for some reason. Would have thrown Mythos at it if I had access to it.

Isn't Fable just Mythos + guardrails? Sounds like you did throw Mythos at it.

I initially thought that was the case: literally the same weights but with an incredibly obnoxious "safety classifier" tacked on. Now I'm uncertain because people on HN have told me it's a different model altogether with further fine tuning for safety or something.

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

#33

Post by mswphd »

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…

https://paseo.sh/ supports self-hosting, though I've only used it a mild amount tbh.

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

#35

Post by hwc »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #24
prairieroadent wrote: post #3

why not just a docker container

Because that means you are sharing kernel with the sandboxed agent. Virtualization presents an infinitely smaller attack surface.

If there is any attack surface within a properly-configured container, that's a kernel bug, right?

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

#36

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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.

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

#37

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> it will suspend when you put your laptop asleep

It is possible to simply not do that. Laptops work just fine as servers. They even have a builtin monitor and UPS.

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

#38

Post by Greenpants »

bheadmaster wrote: post #20
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?

VMs and containers are fairly isolated and reproducible. A separate user on your machine still depends on the programs installed locally.

And those installed programs could have vulnerabilities that just a non-root user account could still take advantage of. Perhaps not likely for an LLM to do, but more so if you let them loose on the internet and they end up coming across prompt injection that instructs exactly that :)

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

#39

Post by killerstorm »

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?

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 good auth, it's now quite common for _apps_ to open listening sockets without much auth...)

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

#40

Post by SoftTalker »

altcognito wrote: post #19
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?

In a corporate environment they may not have that option

But they can run arbitrary VMs?
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