Comment by kaliszad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaliszad | Hacker News Reader

Many people seem to be running OpenCode and similar tools on their laptop with basically no privilege separation, sandboxing, fine-grained permissions settings in the tool itself. This tendency is reflected also by how many plugins are designed, where the default assumption is the tool is running unrestricted on the computer next to some kind of IDE as many authentication callbacks go to some port on localhost and the fallback is to parse out the right parameter from the callback URL. Also for some reasons these tools tend to be relative resource hogs even when waiting for a reply from a remote provider. I mean, I am glad they exist, but it seems very rough around the edges compared to how much attention these tools get nowadays.

Please run at least a dev-container or a VM for the tools. You can use RDP/ VNC/ Spice or even just the terminal with tmux to work within the confines of the container/ machine. You can mirror some stuff into the container/ machine with SSHFS, Samba/ NFS, 9p. You can use all the traditional tools, filesystems and such for reliable snapshots. Push the results separately or don't give direct unrestricted git access to the agent.

It's not that hard. If you are super lazy, you can also pay for a VPS $5/month or something like that and run the workload there.

Hi.

> Please run at least a dev-container or a VM for the tools.

I would like to know how to do this. Could you share your favorite how-to?

I have a pretty non-standard setup but with very standard tools. I didn't follow any specific guide. I have ZFS as the filesystem, for each VM a ZVOL or dataset + raw image and libvirt/ KVM on top. This can be done using e.g. Debian GNU/ Linux in a somewhat straight forward way. You can probably do something like it in WSL2 on Windows although that doesn't really sandbox stuff much or with Docker/ Podman or with VirtualBox.

If you want a dedicated virtual host, Proxmox seems to be pretty easy to install even for relative newcomers and it has a GUI that's decent for new people and seasoned admins as well.

For the remote connection I just use SSH and tmux, so I can comfortably detach and reattach without killing the tool that's running inside the terminal on the remote machine.

I hope this helps even though I didn't provide a step-by step guide.

Hi. You are clearly an LLM user. Have you considered asking an LLM to explain how to do this? If not, why not?

would an LLM have a favourite tool? I'm sure it'll answer, but would it be from personal experience?

In 2026? It will be the tool from the vendor who spends the most ad dollars with Anthropic/Google/etc.

I checked with Gemini 3 Fast and it provided instructions on how to set up a Dev Container or VM. It recommended a Dev Container and gave step-by-step instructions. It also mentioned VMs like VirtualBox and VMWare and recommended best practices.

This is exactly what I would have expected from an expert. Is this not what you are getting?

My broader question is: if someone is asking for instructions for setting up a local agent system, wouldn't it be fair to assume that they should try using an LLM to get instructions? Can't we assume that they are already bought in to the viewpoint that LLMs are useful?

the llm will comment on the average case. when we ask a person for a favourite tool, we expect anecdotes about their own experience - I liked x, but when I tried to do y, it gave me z issues because y is an unusual requirement.

when the question is asked on an open forum, we expect to get n such answers and sometimes we'll recognise our own needs in one or two of them that wouldn't be covered by the median case.

does that make sense?

> when we ask a person for a favourite tool

I think you're focusing too much on the word 'favourite' and not enough on the fact that they didn't actually ask for a favourite tool. They asked for a favourite how-to for using the suggested options, a Dev Container or a VM. I think before asking this question, if a person is (demonstrably in this case) into LLMs, it should be reasonable for them to ask an LLM first. The options are already given. It's not difficult to form a prompt that can make a reasonable LLM give a reasonable answer.

There aren't that many ways to run a Dev Container or VM. Everyone is not special and different, just follow the recommended and common security best practices.

Because I value human input too.

>> Please run at least a dev-container or a VM for the tools.

> I would like to know how to do this. Could you share your favorite how-to?

See: https://www.docker.com/get-started/

EDIT:

Perhaps you are more interested in various sandboxing options. If so, the following may be of interest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595393

Note that while containers can be leveraged to run processes at lower privilege levels, they are not secure by default, and actually run at elevated privileges compared to normal processes.

Make sure the agent cannot launch containers and that you are switching users and dropping privileges.

On a Mac you are running a VM machine that helps, but on Linux it is the user that is responsible for constraints, and by default it is trivial to bypass.

Containers have been fairly successful for security because the most popular images have been leveraging traditional co-hosting methods, like nginx dropping root etc…

By themselves without actively doing the same they are not a security feature.

While there are some reactive defaults, Docker places the responsibility for dropping privileges on the user and image. Just launching a container is security through obscurity.

It can be a powerful tool to improve security posture, but don’t expect it by default.

If you are using VSCode against WSL2 or Linux and you have installed Docker, managing devcontainers is very straightforward. What I usually do is to execute "Connect to host" or "Connect to WSL", then create the project directory and ask VSCode to "Add Dev Container Configuration File". Once the configuration file is created, VSCode itself will ask you if you want to start working inside the container. I'm impressed with the user experience of this feature, to be honest.

Working with devcontainers from CLI wasn't very difficult [0], but I must confess that I only tested it once.

[0] https://containers.dev/supporting

I've started a project [1] recently that tries to implement this sandbox idea. Very new and extremely alpha, but mostly works as a proof of concept (except haven't figured out how to get Shelley working yet), and I'm sure there's a ton of bugs and things to work through, but could be fun to test and experiment with in a vps and report back any issues.

[1] https://github.com/jgbrwn/shelley-lxc

Claude asks you for permissions every time it wants to run something.

Until you run --dangerously-skip-permissions

That's why you run with "dangerously allow all." What's the point of LLMs if I have to manually approve everything? IME you only get half decent results if the agent can run tests, run builds and iterate. I'm not going to look at the wall of texts it produces on every iterations, they are mostly convincing bullshit. I'll review the code it wrote once the tests pass, but I don't want to be "in the loop".

I really like the product created by fly.io's https://sprites.dev/ for AI's sandboxes effectively. I feel like its really apt here (not sponsored lmao wish I was)

Oh btw if someone wants to run servers via qemu, I highly recommend quickemu. It provides default ssh access,sshfs, vnc,spice and all such ports to just your local device of course and also allows one to install debian or any distro (out of many many distros) using quickget.

Its really intuitive for what its worth, definitely worth a try https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

I personally really like zed with ssh open remote. I can always open up terminals in it and use claude code or opencode or any and they provide AI as well (I dont use much AI this way, I make simple scripts for myself so I just copy paste for free from the websites) but I can recommend zed for what its worth as well.

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