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by IanCal 210 days ago
This is a good point.

Docker? I typically want other kinds of isolation for services and things anyway - it’s got its own file system, you could have N versions on the same branch working without conflict (at least the conflict you’d have with work trees).

There is some more plumbing involved but…not much?

Edit - task boards are my first thought for the comms side for agents sharing info.

2 comments

Yeah, I think as agents become more capable, more isolation will be necessary. Hence, I also agree that either containers or VMs will eventually be required. We can see how tools like Cursor already have a built-in browser so that the agent can "see" (probably as text for now) what component you want to modify. In the future, I believe the workflow for an agent will be something like: [make changes] -> [get user input] -> [take a screenshot] -> [process the screenshot and user input] -> [make changes].

I doubt something like this can be implemented easily in a single environment without running into client and server port issues, etc.

Docker is very heavy and more for Linux, I'm on macOS and Windows for desktop software development and can't put my software to test inside Docker. But yeah I could have sandboxes inside macOS and inside Windows (virtualization, VMs, WSL etc.), I'd still need one main orchestrating agent + GUI to rule them all
Here are a couple of (open-source Apache license) projects I wrote to sandbox on Mac, which I use to run my agents, while still being able to build/run macOS apps:

Limited user account: https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

Virtual machine: https://github.com/webcoyote/clodpod

Not 100% sure it will solve your complaints about Docker, but https://OrbStack.com makes working w/ docker, docker-compose, linux vms, and k8s so much better.
I’m pretty sure they were referring to building macOS or Windows desktop programs, which Docker doesn’t help with.