Comment by mlejva | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlejva | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I'm the CEO of the company that built this - E2B [0]. We're building infrastructure for AI code interpreting. Companies like Perplexity are using us.

We're using Firecrackers [1] to power our sandboxes. Funnily enough, we had this repo sitting on our GitHub for about 6 months. We originally made this for one of our customers because they were running evals on the desktop-like environment with GUI for their model.

You can use PyAutoGUI [2] to control the whole environment programmatically.

The desktop-like environment is based on Linux and Xfce [3] at the moment. We chose Xfce because it's a fast and lightweight environment that's also popular and actively supported. However, this Sandbox template is fully customizable and you can create your own desktop environment.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Btw, we're hiring [4]!

[0] https://e2b.dev

[1] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

[2] https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/

[3] https://www.xfce.org/

[4] https://e2b.dev/careers

Thanks, looks cool. XFCE is an excellent choice. It's also my daily driver.

Could you shed light on ab actual use case for this? I think I'm not seeing the elephant in the room here. Personally, quick desktop VMs would be perfect for remote work, kiosks, gui integration tests, and various showcases.

What am I missing here?

I had to dig around the docs but here is what I understand:

AI generates code that will perform "zip all files", but that could be dangerous because "rm -rf *" running on employee laptop is a risk, thus create this disposable desktop for AI to connect and manage, build the code, run the code, then evaluate results, and then destroy the instance.

I personally like it and think every laptop needs to have a read only OS with disposable desktops running for each app. Why does my Outlook need to live in the same world as my IDE?

I don't understand your logic. Zip and rm are different commands or functions.

However, I understand this could be an easy way of doing Qubes OS without Qubes OS.

Soon Outlook won't - it's taking after the Android app they purchased some years back and running in azure and only doing presentation client side via webview2.

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