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	by mrpandas 131 days ago
	Where's the real value for devs in something like this? Hasn't everyone already built this for themselves in the past 2 years? I'm not trying to sound cheeky or poo poo the product, just surprised if this is a thing. I can never read what's useful by gut anymore, I guess.

4 comments

slibhb 131 days ago

> Hasn't everyone already built this for themselves in the past 2 years?

Even if this was true, "everyone building X independently" is evidence that one company should definitely build X and sell it to everyone

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mrkurt 131 days ago

Sandboxes with the right persistence and http routing make excellent dev servers. I have about a million dev servers I just use from whatever computer / phone I happen to be using.

It's really useful to just turn a computer on, use a disk, and then plop its url in the browser.

I currently do one computer per project. I don't even put them in git anymore. I have an MDM server running to manage my kids' phones, a "help me reply to all the people" computer that reads everything I'm supposed to read, a dumb game I play with my son, a family todo list no one uses but me, etc, etc.

Immediate computers have made side projects a lot more fun again. And the nice thing is, they cost nothing when I forget about them.

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messh 131 days ago

This is exactly what I built shellbox.dev for.

SSH in, it resumes where you left off, auto-suspends on disconnect. $0.50/month stopped.

I have the same pattern - one box per project, never think about them until I need them.

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simonw 131 days ago

I'd love to know more about that "help me reply to all the people" one! I definitely need that.

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mrkurt 131 days ago

You will be astonished to know it'a a whole lot of sqlite.

Everything I want to pay attention to gets a token, the server goes and looks for stuff in the api, and seeds local sqlites. If possible, it listens for webhooks to stay fresh.

Mostly the interface is Claude code. I have a web view that gives me some idea of volume, and then I just chat at Claude code to have it see what's going on. It does this by querying and cross referencing sqlite dbs.

I will have claude code send/post a response for me, but I still write them like a meatsack.

It's effectively: long lived HTTP server, sqlite, and then Claude skills for scripts that help it consistently do things based on my awful typing.

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falcor84 131 days ago

> Hasn't everyone already built this for themselves in the past 2 years?

The short answer is no. And more so, I think that "Everyone I know in my milieu already built this for themselves, but the wider industry isn't talking about it" is actually an excellent idea generator for a new product.

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ATechGuy 131 days ago

In the last one year, we have seen several sandboxing wrappers around containers/VMs and they all target one use case AI agent code execution. Why? perhaps because devs are good at building (wrappers around VMs) and chase the AI hype. But how are these different and what value do they offer over VMs? Sounds like a tarpit idea, tbh.

Here's my list of code execution sandboxing agents launched in the last year alone: E2B, AIO Sandbox, Sandboxer, AgentSphere, Yolobox, Exe.dev, yolo-cage, SkillFS, ERA Jazzberry Computer, Vibekit, Daytona, Modal, Cognitora, YepCode, Run Compute, CLI Fence, Landrun, Sprites, pctx-sandbox, pctx Sandbox, Agent SDK, Lima-devbox, OpenServ, Browser Agent Playground, Flintlock Agent, Quickstart, Bouvet Sandbox, Arrakis, Cellmate (ceLLMate), AgentFence, Tasker, DenoSandbox, Capsule (WASM-based), Volant, Nono, NetFence

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ushakov 131 days ago

why? because there’s a huge market demand for Sandboxes. no one would be building this if no one would be buying.

disclaimer: i work at E2B

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ATechGuy 131 days ago

I'm not saying sandboxes are not needed, I'm saying VMs/containers already provide the core tech and it's easy to DIY a sandbox. Would love to understand what value E2B offers over VMs?

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kommunicate 131 days ago

making a local sandbox using docker is easy, but making them work at high volume and low latency is hard

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ATechGuy 131 days ago

That's right. But they (E2B) rely on the underneath Cloud infra to achieve high scalability. Personally, I'm still not sure about the value they add on top of Cloud hosted VMs. GCP/AWS already offer huge discounts to startups, which should be enough for VM-based sandboxing of agents in the MVP phase.

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ushakov 131 days ago

we offer secure cloud VMs that scale up to 100k concurrent instances or more.

the value we sell with our cloud is scale, while our Sandboxes are a commodity that we have proudly open-sourced

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ATechGuy 131 days ago

> we offer secure cloud VMs that scale up to 100k concurrent instances or more.

High scalability and VM isolation is what the Cloud (GCP/AWS, that E2B runs on) offers.

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kommunicate 131 days ago

don't forget runloop!

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