[crawshaw]

For those looking to run agents: the short lifecycle of the typical “sandbox” seems surprisingly limiting to me. I have no actual workflow where I want one of these products. Sometimes a VM can live for 30 minutes, but it also might need to live for a month, and I don’t know beforehand.

This is why I have been avoiding the word sandbox for exe.dev. I don’t think developers agents need something “sandbox” shaped.

[messh]

Checkout https://shellbox.dev for exactly thisnusecase: boxes can be stopped, they are snapshotted to disk then cost just $0.5/month. They wakeup with the same state (memory and processes too) on ssh connections, or web endpoint activity, or just just a cron schedule. When you dont need the box... Just delete it and stop paying. No subscription, managed via ssh

[indigodaddy]

Yeah crawshaw, you should check that out... ;)

[crawshaw]

I’m just going to keep building. :)

[mikepurvis]

I'm a relatively basic claude code user, basically just running a few instances in different terminal tabs and monitoring them pretty closely, but I could definitely see value in being able to dump a bunch of code and tools into a workspace where there's no credentials present and just set an agent some goals to research or try a bunch of things in a mostly unsupervised manner.

[crawshaw]

I think it’s worth trying. There’s a lot of value in having the agent in the box. You can give it root so it can do something like tcpdump unsupervised. And if you happen to build a new server, you can keep it serving indefinitely. That’s the whole motivation behind exe.dev.

[tastyeffectco]

stop-on-idle + wake-on-HTTP https://github.com/tastyeffectco/sandboxd/

[sublimefire]

Yeah I have some stuff which is supposed to be “there” for months with the agents continually moving it forward. Not to mention the need to run different software. Running local VMs for now.

[crawshaw]

If you have a good local VM flow that’s great. I couldn’t make it work for me. I ended up needing it to run when my laptop was shut, both as an agent and the servers I am building.

It’s a real tension, working with a remote dev env has never been my first choice. But agents seem to tip the balance enough in favor of remote that I have switched.