You can’t easily snapshot the current state of an OS and restore to that state like with git.

madeofpalk 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe not for very broad definitions of OS state, but for specific files/folders/filesystems, this is trivial with FS-level snapshots and copy-on-write.

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alwillis 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At least on macOS, an OS snapshot is a thing [1]; I suspect Cowork will mostly run in a sandbox, which Claude Code does now.

[1]: https://www.cleverfiles.com/help/apfs-snapshots.html

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nikkwong 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ok, you can "easily", but how quickly can you revert to a snapshot? I would guess creating a snapshot for each turn change with an LLM become too burdensome to allow you to iterate quickly.

	▲	alwillis 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For the vast majority, this won't be an issue. This is essentially a UI on top of Claude Code, which supports running in a sandbox on macOS.

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bigyabai 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All major OSes support snapshotting, and it's not a panacea on any of them.

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Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well there is cri-u for what its worth on linux which can atleast snapshot the state of an application and I suppose something must be similar available for filesystems as well

Also one can simply run a virtual machine which can do that but then the issue becomes in how apps from outside connect to vm inside

	▲	nicoty 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Filesystems like zfs, btrfs and bcachefs have snapshot creation and rollbacks as features.

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viraptor 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure you can. Filesystem snapshotting is available on all OSes now.

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Analemma_ 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder if in the long run this will lead to the ascent of NixOS. They seem perfect for each other: if you have git and/or a snapshotting filesystem, together with the entire system state being downstram of your .nix file, then go ahead and let the LLM make changes willy-nilly, you can always roll back to a known good version.

NixOS still isn't ready for this world, but if it becomes the natural counterpart to LLM OS tooling, maybe that will speed up development.