OK, let’s survey how everybody is sandboxing their AI coding agents in early 2026.

What I’ve seen suggests the most common answers are (a) “containers” and (b) “YOLO!” (maybe adding, “Please play nice, agent.”).

One approach that I’m about to try is Sandvault [0] (macOS only), which uses the good old Unix user system together with some added precautions. Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account and interact with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories.

0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

I use KVM/QEMU on Linux. I have a set of scripts that I use to create a new directory with a VM project and that also installs a debian image for the VM. I have an ./pull_from_vm and ./push_to_vm that I use to pull and push the git code to and from the vm. As well as a ./claude to start claude on the vm and a ./emacs to initialize and start emacs on the vm after syncing my local .spacemacs directory to the vm (I like this because of customized emacs muscle memory and because I worry that emacs can execute arbitrary code if I use it to ssh to the VM client from my host).

I try not to run LLM's directly on my own host. The only exception I have is that I do use https://github.com/karthink/gptel on my own machine, because it is just too damn useful. I hope I don't self own myself with that someday.

Looked into Apples container framework first (for proper isolation) but switched to Docker sandboxes since they switched to mircoVMs too: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/#why-use-docker-sandbox...

Sandvault author here: thanks for the shout-out!

I would add that in addition to Unix permissions, sandvault also utilizes macOS sandbox-exec to further limit the blast radius.

I'm mainly addressing sandboxing by running stuff in Claude Code for web, at which point it's Anthropic's problem if they have a sandbox leak, not mine.

It helps that most of my projects are open source so I don't need to worry about prompt injection code stealing vulnerabilities. That way the worst that can happen would be an attack adding a vulnerability to my code that I don't spot when I review the PR.

And turning off outbound networking should protect against code stealing too... but I allow access to everything because I don't need to worry about code stealing and that way Claude can install things and run benchmarks and generally do all sorts of other useful bits and pieces.

Shell over MCP, with multiple options for sandbox. Includes Docker, Podman, Modal, E2B, and WASM:

https://github.com/Kiln-AI/Kilntainers

Can run anything from a busybox in WASM to a full cloud VM. Agent just sees a shell.