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e1gyesterday at 9:07 PM6 repliesview on HN

Creator here - didn't expect this to go public so soon. A few notes:

1. I built this because I like my agents to be local. Not in a container, not in a remote server, but running on my finely-tuned machine. This helps me run all agents on full-auto, in peace.

2. Yes, it's just a policy-generator for sandbox-exec. IMO, that's the best part about the project - no dependencies, no fancy tech, no virtualization. But I did put in many hours to identify the minimum required permissions for agents to continue working with auto-updates, keychain integration, and pasting images, etc. There are notes about my investigations into what each agent needs https://agent-safehouse.dev/docs/agent-investigations/ (AI-generated)

3. You don't even need the rest of the project and use just the Policy Builder to generate a single sandbox-exec policy you can put into your dotfiles https://agent-safehouse.dev/policy-builder.html


Replies

atombenderyesterday at 10:25 PM

OP here. Sorry if this was premature. I came across it through your earlier comment on HN, started using it (as did a colleague), and we've been impressed enough with how efficient it is that I decided it deserved a post!

I've seen sandbox policy documents for agents before, but this is the first ready-to-use app I've come across.

I've only had a couple of points of friction so far:

- Files like .gitconfig and .gitignore in the home folder aren't accessible, and can't be made accessible without granting read only access to the home folder, I think?

- Process access is limited, so I can't ask Claude to run lldb or pkill or other commands that can help me debug local processes.

More fine-grained control would be really nice.

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TheBengaluruGuyyesterday at 10:12 PM

I'm wondering if this could be adapted for openclaw. Running it in a machine that's accessible reduces friction and enables a lot of use-cases but equally hard to control/restrict it

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asablayesterday at 9:41 PM

Oh woah!

I've been trying to get microsandbox to play nicely. But this is much closer to what I actually need.

I glimpsed through the site and the script. But couldn't really see any obvious gotchas.

Any you've found so far which hasn't been documented yet?

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quietsegfaulttoday at 2:22 AM

What’s the difference between running natively and in a container, really?

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siwatanejotoday at 1:40 AM

It's kinda funny that I, being skeptical about coding agents and their potential dangers, was interested to give your project a go because I don't trust AI.

Yet the first thing I find in your README is that to install your tool I need to trust some random server serve me an .sh file that I will execute in my computer (not sure if with sudo... but still).

Come on man, give me a tarball :)

EDIT: PS: before someone gives me the typical "but you could have malware in that tarball too!!!", well, it's easier to inspect what's inside the tarball and compare it to the sources of the repo, maybe also take a look at the CI of the repo to see if the tarball is really generated automatically from the contents of the repo ;)

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dioniantoday at 3:11 AM

i toyed around with policy builder for a few seconds, i was really impressed. great UX