Could someone explain to me what the general workflow is now that people are converging to? I haven't really been catching up with the AI ecosystem but I was looking into agent sandboxes and VM's recently and there's a ton of these startups and tools now. Is giving the agent a temporary scratchbox really that valuable?
I've been still just like, making VM's with proxmox, then putting my agent in the machine and letting it run free (with my dotfiles setup script making dev env pretty much free, though I could also just make a VM snapshot). What's wrong with that? Is that not the scalable solution for enterprise rn?
I'm working on something in the "cloud VMs for agents" space[1], so I have some battle scars and opinions!
IMO, you want the flexibility to create either: (a) permanent devbox VMs, and (b) per-task VMs
Agent sandbox platforms tend to be tuned for the latter, which sometimes involves VMM hackery for fast boot, snapshotting VM filesystem and RAM, etc.
Some workflows are a lot simpler if the multiple agents share a VM. These are workflows where agents must share state. A simple one we have: making related changes in our public OSS repo and our private repo, and then testing the change.
And other times you want to split up the tasks onto isolated VMs so they don't interfere with each other (ie run two dev servers without database or port collisions).
I tweeted a bit about this (<a href="https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2099264325231771878" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2099264325231771878) and had a little debate with folks about ephemeral vs persistent VMs for agents
sigbottle · · focus · HN ↗
I've been still just like, making VM's with proxmox, then putting my agent in the machine and letting it run free (with my dotfiles setup script making dev env pretty much free, though I could also just make a VM snapshot). What's wrong with that? Is that not the scalable solution for enterprise rn?
dbmikus · · focus · HN ↗
IMO, you want the flexibility to create either: (a) permanent devbox VMs, and (b) per-task VMs
Agent sandbox platforms tend to be tuned for the latter, which sometimes involves VMM hackery for fast boot, snapshotting VM filesystem and RAM, etc.
Some workflows are a lot simpler if the multiple agents share a VM. These are workflows where agents must share state. A simple one we have: making related changes in our public OSS repo and our private repo, and then testing the change.
And other times you want to split up the tasks onto isolated VMs so they don't interfere with each other (ie run two dev servers without database or port collisions).
I tweeted a bit about this (<a href="https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2099264325231771878" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/dbmikus/status/2099264325231771878) and had a little debate with folks about ephemeral vs persistent VMs for agents
[1]: <a href="https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika
sroussey · · focus · HN ↗
srcreigh · · focus · HN ↗