alt Hacker NewsYeah, keep it in a VM or a box you don't care about. If you're running it on your primary machine, you're a dumbass even if you turn on sandbox mode.
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The thing is running it onto your machine is kinda the point. These agents are meant to operate at the same level - and perhaps replace - your mail agent and file navigator. So if we sandbox too much we make it useless. The compromise being having separate folders for AI, a bit like having a Dropbox folder on your machine with some subfolders being personal, shared, readonly etc. Running terminal commands is usually just a bad idea though in this case, you'd want to disable that and instead fine tune a very well configured MCP server that runs the commands with a minimal blast radius.
Cloudflare jumped on the hype and shipped a worker: https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/ I guess that would be an easy and secure way to run it.
Now they have to rename again, though... [1]
It's really easy to run this in a container. The upside is you get a lot of protection included. The downside is you're rebuilding the container to add binaries. The latter seems like a fair tradeoff.
What I'll say about OpenClaw is that it truly feels vibe coded, I say that in a negative context. It just doesn't feel well put together like OpenCode does. And it definitely doesn't handle context overruns as well. Ultimately I think the agent implementation in n8n is better done and provides far more safeguards and extensibility. But I get it - OpenClaw is supposed to run on your machine. For me, though, if I have an assistant/agent I want it to just live in those chat apps. At that rate it's running in a container on a VPS or LXC in my home lab. This is where a powerful-enough local machine does make sense and I can see why folks were buying Mac Minis for this. But, given the quality of the project, again in my opinion, it's nothing spectacular in terms of what it can do at this point. And in some cases it's more clunky given its UI compared to other options that exist which provide the same functionality.