I've been working on an OSS project, Amika[1], to quickly spin up local or remote sandboxes for coding workloads. We support copy-on-write semantics locally (well, "copy-and-then-write" for now... we just copy directories to a temp file-tree).

It's tailored to play nicely with Git: spin up sandboxes form CLI, expose TCP/UDP ports of apps to check your work, and if running hosted sandboxes, share the sandbox URLs with teammates. I basically want running sandboxed agents to be as easy as `git clone ...`.

Docs are early and edges are rough. This week I'm starting to dogfood all my dev using Amika. Feedback is super appreciated!

FYI: we are also a startup, but local sandbox mgmt will stay OSS.

[1]: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika

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xyzzy_plugh 10 hours ago | parent [-]

This is just a thin wrapper over Docker. It still doesn't offer what I want. I can't run macOS apps, and if I'm doing any sort of compilation, now I need a cross-compile toolchain (and need to target two platforms??).

Just use Docker, or a VM.

The other issue is that this does not facilitate unpredictable file access -- I have to mount everything up front. Sometimes you don't know what you need. And even then copying in and out is very different from a true overlay.

	▲	dbmikus 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Appreciate the deets! It sounds like a big part of your use case is to safely give an agent control of your computer? Like, for things besides codegen? We're probably not going to directly support that type of use case, since we're focused on code-gen agents and migrating their work between localhost and the cloud. We are going to add dynamic filesystem mounting, for after sandbox creation. Haven't figured out the exact implementation yet. Might be a FUSE layer we build ourselves. Mutagen is pretty interesting as well here.