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by simonw 269 days ago
I've been trying out GitHub Codespaces as a sandbox, which works pretty well.

I wrote a bit about that in a new post this morning, but I'm still looking for an ideal solution: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loop...

1 comments

Using a container or a VM is still friction compared to just working on your files directly using a separate user account to prevent unsophisticated bad behaviour. I:

-create a separate linux user, put it in an 'appshare' group, set its umask to 002 (default rwxrwxr.x)

-optional: setup some symlinks from its home dir to mine such as various ~/.config/... so it can use my installed packages and opencode config, etc. I have the option to give it limited write access with chgrp to appshare and chmod g+w (e.g. julia's cache)

-optional: setup firewall rules

-if it only needs read-only access to my git history it can work in a git worktree. I can then make git commits with my user account from the worktree. Or I can chgrp/chown my main working copy. Otherwise it needs a separate checkout