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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Here's the announcement on the Fly blog: https://fly.io/blog/code-and-let-live/ - and the Hacker News thread for that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46557825

I wrote about this because it hits two of my current obsessions at once - developer environment sandboxes (for safely running Claude Code etc in YOLO mode) and APIs for executing untrusted code.

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>> In a smart piece of design, Sprites uses pre-installed skills to teach Claude how Sprites itself works. This means you can ask Claude on the machine how to do things like open up ports and it will talk you through the process.

^^ So is Claude Code baked into a default sprite? If so, how/who/what API key is paying for CC? (I'm assuming this gets configured some way? Perhaps in just the normal CC CLI way?)

Yes it's baked in. You as the user pay for a separate Anthropic account and login with that when you first use a sprite.

Stupid question but why not use a local sandbox for yolo mode instead of a remote machine.

Is there a similar service that runs locally?

a local sandbox may not be perfectly isolated, unless you’re running it in a VM. But then that takes up local resources. or you’re on the go a lot. a person might not have a reliable local machine or network or be in a position to keep it on and consistent all the time.

literally sandboxes in the cloud. sand castles…

That seems fine if you have a box that's running all the time and something like tailscale set up. I haven't bothered because I'm lazy, but I do want any coding agents I have off my laptop and off the local network, because I'm a little wary about them getting subverted. They need Internet access anyway, so might as well.

Since I anticipate using coding agents a lot, that means my dev environment is going to live in a VM in the cloud from now on.

The big issue with this is though that GPUs are not available. I believe many people have local workstation boxes where they do dev on and need proper sandboxes and stuff like firecracker is also not super useful as afaik GPU passthrough is not ideal/working. Or any kinds of larger HW requirements.

A workaround might be to copy a directory out with something like Syncthing so you can test locally. But then the coding agent can't help you. So yeah, I can see setting up a box for that. I'm doing web development so it's not an issue for me.

then all benefit from the sandbox is lost

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