[ericmsimons]

Hi HN! Cofounder of StackBlitz/WebContainers here, cool to wake up and see this on the front page unexpectedly :) Happy to answer any questions!

Btw one emergent use case we've seen growing rapidly has been code execution for AI agents. Would love thoughts/questions/feedback if you’re working on things in that space: https://webcontainers.io/ai

[spankalee]

What's the patent you mention on the site? Are any other web-based terminal, shell, or Node emulators at risk of violating it? Is it for a specific implementation technique? It's kind of scary to see in the docs, to be honest.

[ericmsimons]

Good question, here's the link to it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220417315A1/en?q=(stac...

It's somewhat specific to our use case as you'll see when you read through. A motivation for securing this was that we've had issues (one instance in particular) where we caught a direct competitor directly copy+pasting code from our compiled builds into their own competing product. Asking them nicely to stop didn't do anything, nor getting emails from our lawyers.

The main lever a startup has to solve this is to keep innovating and being the best product in the market, which is what we have done & continue to do. But having a patent is a useful lever for general deterrence from bad actors like this. (Also want to say thanks and give credit to Vinay Hiremath, cofounder of Loom, who went through similar in the early days of Loom and helped point us down the path of securing a patent)

[jraph]

I'm surprised a patent would be necessary for this. Wouldn't copyright already prevent them to do so?

[ericmsimons]

Technically speaking yes, but practically it turns out you often need multiple levers to actually get resolution when dealing with bad faith actors.

At some point I intend to write a blog post about what happened so other startups have a frame of reference on how to deal with this sort of thing. Truly wild stuff and can be very counterintuitive.

[spankalee]

Thanks for the direct answer!

[orliesaurus]

Hi working on agentic code execution, can you explain why you think a webcontainer is a good and useful solution to do LLM code exec over other low level container solutions