A deep dive on agent sandboxes

41 points by icyfox a day ago on hackernews | 10 comments

I would like to see more articles about agent sandboxes. With agents gaining popularity we need a higher fraction of users to understand containers and sandboxes and their risk profiles, and then to communicate their understandings to friends and family. It is a harder task than explaining ChatGPT, and it often feels like a hindrance.

: sea-gold | 27 minutes ago
This was also a great read: https://www.luiscardoso.dev/blog/sandboxes-for-ai

ashishb | 22 hours ago

6 months back I started dockerizing my setup after multiple npm vulnerabilities.

Then I wrote a small tool[1] to streamline my sandboxing.

Now, I run agents inside it for keeping my non-working-directory files safe.

For some tools like markdown linter, I run them without network access as well.

1- https://github.com/ashishb/amazing-sandbox

nullishdomain | 22 hours ago

This looks awesome! Do you have a mental process you run through to determine what gets run in the sandbox, or is it your default mode for all tools?

: ashishb | 21 hours ago
> This looks awesome! Do you have a mental process you run through to determine what gets run in the sandbox, or is it your default mode for all tools?
Here's what I use it for right now
- yarn - npm - pnpm - mdl - Ruby-based Markdown linter - fastlane - Ruby-based mobile app release tool by Google - Claude Code - Gemini CLI
Over time, my goal is to run all CLI-based tools that only need access to the current directory (and not parent directories) via this.

gouthamve | 9 hours ago

Hugged to death? Seeing SSL failure to the site from CloudFlare.

zmj | 2 hours ago

devcontainers, devcontainers, devcontainers

: bigwheels | 2 hours ago
Totally, devcontainers are fantastic! In this agent sandboxing space there's also Leash, which in addition to Docker/Orbstack/Podman provides a sophisticated macOS-native system extension mode - https://github.com/strongdm/leash
: binsquare | 2 hours ago
I don't think containers are enough especially for the security side of things.
Imo microvm's+ dev containers seem like a good fit though

linolevan | 2 hours ago

The secret proxy trick is something I expect to become standard at some point in the near future. I first saw this trick being used in Deno Sandboxes (https://docs.deno.com/sandboxes/security/) but it's cheap/easy to implement so I'd be surprised if this doesn't become the standard for a lot of these BaaS platforms.