I'm currently using a qemu vm for the codex with the --yolo flag but same thing. I've been also looking at using lima for automating the creation of vms. But it does a few weird/dangerous things like mounting the entire user directory read/write. Which kind of defeats the point. There are ways of turning that off probably but it does a few dangerous/annoying things wrong by default.

But a simple vm and some automation to install developer tools using ansible, nix or whatever you prefer isn't that hard to (vibe) code together. I like Lima but it feels slightly sub-optimal for the job currently.

Some useful things to consider:

- Ssh agent forwarding for authenticating against e.g. git is useful. But maybe don't use the same key that authenticates to your production machines as well ...

- How do you authenticate without a browser? Most AI tools have ways to deal with that but it's slightly tedious to automate during provisioning.

- Making sure all your development tools are there; I use things like sdkman, nvm, bun, etc. And I have my shell preferences and some other tools I like to have around.

- Minimizing time provisioning these vms over and over again. This gets tedious really quickly.

- Keeping the VMs fast is important too. In my projects, build tool performance adds up and AI tools like to call them a lot. So assign enough memory and CPU.

- It would be nice to switch between local and remote/cloud based vms easily.

- Software flexibility; developers are picky about their tools. There is no one size fits all here. Even just deciding on the base image to use for your vm is likely to escalate. I picked debian for what it is worth.

In short, I think there's enough out there that you can pull something together but it still involves quite a bit of DIY. It would be nice if this got easier. And AI tools asking for permission for everything is not a good security model. Because people just turn that off. Sandboxing those things is the way to go. But AI tools need to be able to do enough to work with your software.