I'm somewhat surprised that this is not open source (from what I can tell). Compare to Mimo Code https://github.com/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-Code (which is a CLI, while this is a desktop app).
You can do a brainstorming with web on a remote container prototyping based on that brainstorm on another container with no network access.
The one thing that is less trustworthy is using local agents for service management, you definitely want to have them scoped to dev/testing. I would never trust an agent to execute any command in production or sensitive data at all
I have read about people giving an agent full access to their main system saying they have nothing of value. To me, that's a strange opinion to have with the distinction between what's private and what's secret.
I've also started creating new github deploy keys for each repo in use on a VM, so the blast area for any given agent disaster is "a couple/few github repos and whatever credentials were needed for the agent/model".
I wouldn't let a coworker, even one I know pretty well, log into my personal account on my machines...why would I let an agent that can be tricked into uploading all my credentials to an attackers web server?
The agents have sandboxes, but those are loose. Not enforced by anything outside of the agent harness itself.
You might want to check out Ant's open source srt [0], I use it to contain my local coding agents. It's strict by default and enforced at the OS layer.
[0] https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime
I do the same: my agents run in a hardened VM on a hardened Linux machines in a separated network in my basement. The magic of ssh makes this setup transparent for me on my desktop. But extremely hard for my agent to do nasty things.
This way, all members of the student union were able to install any software they wanted to on the student union computers without having to give out blanket root access to the members. Only a select few members had full root access.
There’s other ways to achieve the same too.
And you can do this exact same sort of thing for the user that your agent runs as too, without having to give it access to do everything that root can.
After you had been a member for a while and demonstrated that you mostly knew what you were doing, they’d give you full root access if you had some reason to want it that they agreed with.
And thanks to the dedicated suid program that exec’d into apt, wanting to install additional software was not a reason to be granted full root privileges since everyone could already install packages from the apt repositories this way without full root privileges.
Along with full root access came basically just a couple of simple rules, one of which was:
Do not abuse your root access to walk into other members home directories.
That rule was put in place after a previous member with root access had used the root privileges to copy the homework of another member into his own home directory without asking the other member for permission to see his work.
Aside from that one thing happening that one time, there hadn’t really been anyone doing anything malicious AFAIK. We were a rather small group of members in this student union, and it was a pretty chill and nice place. People came there to hang out, drink beer and tinker with electronics and computers.
There wasn’t much that root privileges could be abused for anyway. Regular members could already use all of the machines via graphical login at the desks, and remotely over ssh. Really the main two things anyone could have done maliciously would be to steal other people’s homework (like that one guy was kicked out for doing), or to steal credentials from others (no known cases of that happening there).
And if someone had started acting really maliciously, using the student union computers to attack the wider network, the university would have been on top of that real fast. The computer network of the student union was a subnet of the university network, and this university had a very competent crew of people watching over the university computer network as a whole.
A friend of mine once wondered how many computers were on the university computer network in total and did a port scan from one of the university computers (not from the student union computers). It did not take long from he started the port scan until university employees contacted him and gave him a stern talking to, and also told him the proper way find the answer to how many computers were on the university network.
And, we're not talking about hypothetical attacks here. Prompt injection attacks have happened. Supply chain attacks that agents fell for have happened.
https://venturebeat.com/security/six-exploits-broke-ai-codin...
I'm going to "security in depth" these gullible little thinky guys in my computer, but you do what makes you happy.
You can't see how the agent having no access to anything other than what it's working on is safer than the agent having access to my home directory with all of my credentials?
Look, you do whatever you want to do with your agents and your computer. I'm going to...contain them.
https://venturebeat.com/security/six-exploits-broke-ai-codin...
In that case, maybe you want VMs at hosting providers. There are companies building ephemeral VM and container orchestration layers for this kind of thing, I haven't played with them, though. It seems like a reasonable idea, though. One isolated environment per project or repo. Only the secrets needed for that one project and an agent that can't reach outside of it.
I've considered building something along those lines, and actually do run my security auditing benchmarks in containers automatically (that was originally to prevent the models from cheating, because you can disable network, but it has other pleasant side effects).
It's actually not that big of a lift these days to spin up containers on-demand and put just what's needed inside it (including the authentication info for the agent). I probably should automate it..right now I just have four permanent VMs setup for my various types of work: My day job, my open source projects, my benchmark and security work, and some side projects. Plus some temporary ones for experiments.
I've never used IDEs and never will, why are these things being constantly shoved down our throats?
I also maintain https://github.com/nothingnesses/agent-images which allows you to use Nix to reproducibly spin up OCI container images containing agents and any other tools you need for development and use these with agent-box.
I use both at the moment to work on some personal projects with agents, where I set up multiple separate git worktrees for the agents to work in, preventing them from accessing anything outside of the worktrees and from trampling over each other's work.
What's your setup like and what do you use it for?
I have a M2 Max MBP with plenty of ram and I use VSCode + Zoo Code plugin with Qwen3-Coder-Next-GGUF:UD-Q4_K_XL to run local agentic coding sessions, but I'm intrigued by being able to run headless as I could probably run multiple instances in parallel to do stuff?
Like are you using UTM with some pre-built VM and a local LLM?
Curious.
shameless self-plug. I've been dogfooding it for the last 3 weeks now.
Edit: my theory is they wanted to mimic being the primary provider in a quick way with a lot of string replace. Though they could have added opencode back as a regular provider.
By the way, their repo was a bit weird with no changelogs at all. It seems to be picking up speed now with their communication. I actually read in the changelog just now that their Compose (plan/executre/review etc. something like that) flow is now deterministic with software instead of just prompts. That could be really good.
Harnesses are quickly becoming critical components of the "model" itself imo. Not shocking to me at all that a company that spots a revenue opportunity is keeping its harness closed source.
A harness is that covering every blind spot or sub-optimal but probable output people have hit in the wild, and a lot of problems just have better solutions if you say "break problem A into subproblem B and subproblem C, then solve".
Here on HN we discuss facts, jumping straight into racism has no place here.
It's the same in the US, read Snowden's book.
secondly, you're claiming that it is the same in the US. there is no laws in the US requiring private companies to exfiltrate data and send it to the government en masse, like there is in China. these laws just don't exist, and if they did exist they would be ruled unconstitutional in violation of the Fourth amendment. As a matter of fact, last week Supreme Court decision in Chatrie v. United States came out on Monday, June 29, 2026 that affirmed that general warrants are a violation of the Fourth amendment, related to sweeping geofence warrants. so what you're talking about just does not exist. Yeah, I'm sure some companies, like Facebook, Google, etc have private agreements with government agencies to release data privately, these rules eventually are a violation of the Fourth amendment without a warrant.
to avoid any of this, I use open models with small providers that are very unlikely to be having private agreements with government agencies specifically to avoid that conflict. it's up to you to protect your own privacy. but to claim that the US government is doing this with AI companies, it's just flat wrong.
"Just after I arrived in Japan, Perot Systems was bought by Dell, the personal computer maker, which was trying to expand its business into IT support and corporate and government services. Overnight, my ID badges and paystubs changed, and I became a Dell employee. This meant that the US government was paying Dell for my services, and Dell was taking a cut of that money and passing the rest along to me."That idea is wrong, though. These same people thinking harnesses are part of a moat are also boasting that s/ware is easily writable now.
There's no secret sauce in a harness that you can't vibe-code into your own harness.
I'm not saying you're wrong necessarily, but I do think that when the actions and words of a company conflict, it's a pretty safe bet that the words are just posturing and the actions better reflect their actual belief. In this case, regardless of what they're saying about software being easily writable now, they clearly seem to at least think there's something valuable in the harness if they're not open sourcing it.
Except you'd need the knowledge of what to vibe-code, no?
What knowledge? If you've used a harness, you know what it is supposed to do for you!
What further knowledge do you need that can't be extracted from an existing harness?
It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, meaning you are just handing over your entire system to a Chinese-owned server. With OpenCode and its GLM provider, at least I can monitor which files were read, which were edited, and what commands were executed.
Not to mention that Chinese national security laws legally obligate companies to cooperate with state intelligence and counter-espionage efforts [0]. If you have this installed on a corporate workstation, and your company is large enough, the possibility of them spying on you is not just a risk—it's almost a certainty.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_t...
no. they. are. not.
Some people are just terrible at it.
Dunno. I’ve moved to Pi for most of my work and it’s finally better than Claude Code for me; BUT the Anthropic models are definitely better in CC itself.
Also you don't need to believe me. There is enough evidence in the open source space.