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Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

Outside of the article's mentioned graphics development, there is no reason to isolate an agent using actual hardware. I threw together this script[0] using libvirt to give claude its own graphical desktop env to be able to do user acceptance testing with Chrome. It has full root and can do what ever. If it makes a mess, I can dump and reinstall in seconds.

0: https://gist.github.com/smith153/04b4068b5a2d7b234f1c3d5992d...

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Nice. I just have

  sudo useradd agent

  sudo su agent

So it can blow up its own files, but not mine.

It was also doing some kind of headless Chrome stuff in there. I don't know how that works, but it was taking screenshots iirc.

I did also set up VNC at some point but didn't find it worth using.

>If it makes a mess, I can dump and reinstall in seconds.

This is also true of a $3 VPS, where I found it very amusing to give my agent root. What's the worst that could happen ;)

Patiënt zero, that’s what :-)

You can run macOS in a VM guest on a Mac host; Apple explicitly allows this.

This is neat, and thank you for sharing!

I've been wanting to set up something exactly like this for my own use, but... You know, time is limited.

This is just enough scaffolding to have a little project for Monday morning!

I also have a light weight cross platform virtual machine with egress filtering if you're looking for an even more batteries included approach.

https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm

There are many ways and tools on linux to get a "VM" up and running. But with libvirt you can easy script out what the initial environment and network stack is. The heart of it is just running the 'virt-install' command, but as you can see I've got a bunch of other opinionated stuff going on before that.

Nice to give Claude their own blue bubble iMessage. Can be done in a VM of course if you have the capacity, but old Apple hardware seems to accumulate for many.

You mean you had claude throw together a script because this is heavily generated. Lost interest after about 250 lines, it's just tiresome reading through this incoherent amalgamation

I don't know what sort of shell scripts you've had to review in your day... I used to get far worse shell scripts, assuredly

Yeah bro, you can just use AI!

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