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Comment by nzoschke | Hacker News Reader

We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop.

The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM.

exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built in.

I generally drop in in my own binary with toolkit so I can connect Claude or Codex subscription and use their harness.

https://github.com/housecat-inc/scratch

If I was working with newer agents like Grok I'd absolutely experiment on a cloud sandbox before running on my laptop bypassing permissions.

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> We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop.

Some/maybe most of the HN crowd, sure, but as a rule ... definitely not. People are generally happy to take whatever the path of least resistance is.

I know quite a few civilians (even C-level people) who "heard openclaw was cool" (or whatever) and downloaded the first installer they found and hit enter/run without thinking twice.

No question most folks will simply take the path of least resistance.

We need to make it easier (and faster and cheaper) to get a secure cloud agent computer than it is to YOLO it on your own computer.

How would it mitigate this issue? Presumably you'd need all the code for a given project inside the sandbox anyways, so the agent will still be able to upload everything. The only thing it might mitigate is you accidentally uploading your home directory.

The home directory is the scariest thing to me. The agent needs the code to code, but it doesn't need your personal files or secrets.

Personally I'm not worried about sharing business code with the model providers. The value of code and IP is decreasing to zero, the only thing that matters is execution on the business front. If they want to steal your business they can do so by rebuilding the idea from scratch.

Or if you're on Linux or macOS, learn how Unix permissions work and can be used for, create a new restricted user locally, use that. No need to go all remote with all its drawbacks just to limit a little local process on your computer.

Even better: you can fork the exeuntu image & make it immediately more relevant to the things you do in addition to just dropping in your programs and such.

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