There are a number of utilities for this. I use jai: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/ but also have seen nono: https://github.com/always-further/nono smolvm: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm zerobox https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox and matchlock https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock

They all have pros and cons. Pick the one that suits you best. Then you're also agent harness flexible (I use opencode).

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johnsonjo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As a jai and linux user, myself, looking at nono's os-sandbox (from here [1]) it seems nice too. Thanks for the recommend I was looking for something that might be nice on Mac and nono seems good to recommend to coworkers and the like.

[1]: https://nono.sh/os-sandbox

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sophrosyne42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would like a solution that was itself not largely written by an AI

	▲	johnsonjo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Jai is not written by ai only it's website is. It's written by a Stanford Computer-Science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience. > [1]: Was jai written by an AI coding agent? No. While this web site was obviously made by an LLM (ChatGPT read the man page, asked some follow-up questions, and produced a prompt from which claude code built a vitepress site), jai itself was hand implemented by a Stanford computer science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience. As an experiment, the author did previously try vibe-coding a container, but the results were disastrous and repeatedly put his machine in a state that required a reboot (e.g., recursively changing the attributes of all mounts in the wrong mount namespace). The author does use coding agents to look for bugs, get feedback, and develop tests. However, rest assured that a single human understands every line of C++ in jai. [1] https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/faq.html