Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent Sandbox with a Transactional, Versioned Filesystem

Just my two cents: less is more and the first impression matters a lot. I'm saying this because we see a new agent sandbox tool on the front-page almost every day. Most of them have an AI-made landing page design, lots of animations, lots of words. This has become a bad sign for me. I can tell that you put time into it, made a video, and everything, but I guess I'm suffering from some kind of fatigue of having to go through all these tools. So, the less I have to process to get to the meat of exactly what I'm looking at, what sets this apart from others, why and when I would need to use it, then the more likely I am to actually engage with the product.

I made something pretty similar to this a couple months ago, when I was just getting into using coding agents. Has 2 parts that work individually but are better together: a change tracking FS and an agent sandbox. Haven't really used it though as it's a pain to get Claude Code working in that - Docker-based - sandbox without baking it in, and I really want something that's fully configurable. And then I didn't really need it to because I'm a very interactive user; I'm almost constantly watching the agent and never use YOLO... except for 1 codebase where it's frustratingly failing to fix a single particular bug and I really don't want to deal with it myself.

This is an excellent idea who's time has come.

But this is too vague for me. I'm not seeing my questions answered in the landing page or FAQ either.

E.g.,... what's the pricing?

How does atomic commit really work? E.g., if one write to S3 succeeds but the update to a git repo fails?

Does this use optimistic locking or something else? What happens if I commit changes to a resource that was updated since it was imported?

Where/how is it hosted?

The versioned filesystem is exactly what's missing when agents hallucinate and go off the rails. How fast are the rollbacks if an agent completely messes up the directory state?

Does this provide gitflow to handle conflicts from multiple agents touching the same file system or is it purely for single-branch sequential iterations on the filesystem?

I have a use case that could use this if it supports handling branching and merging file systems.

Back in the 1970's when versioned filesystems were invented, they provided a recovery path for when a file was improperly changed or deleted. Now, in the age of LLMs that go rouge, I can see why they would become popular again.

Nice work on the website!

Building something for the same problem but from more so from the perspective of self-hostable stateful sandboxes, and not just the filesystem (see https://bhatti.sh). What sandbox solution are you using here?

It was a nice surprise seeing your post on the first page of HN Oz, congrats!

If I understand correctly what Tilde is doing is extending the concept of the sandbox in an operating system - filesystem, to data too.

So this is a sandbox environment someone would use for data heavy agentic workloads, is this correct?

more tools I will never use or need theres just an endless supply of new open source projects now I stopped paying attention

I increasingly feel the impact of landing on the frontpage of HN is not as pronounced as it used to be. The demographic shift of HN is also noted, it has a lot more "reddit" vibe than I remember.

I was trying to build an agent. None of the sandboxes out there had solved the filesystem problem. I want my agent to have a persistent storage, and that stays forever. Like a human with a computer. When the agent spins up again, it has access to the computer with the same files.

I had to create my own setup using aws s3 filesystem and docker for this.

Does Tilde solve for this?

> Free to start

Before I invest my time into something like this I'll need to know what it'll end up costing in the end. Perhaps it's just that "private previews" aren't for me. Good luck!

Interesting project. I am building an IDE for my phone and browser (www.propelcode.app) and have evaluated a few container architectures and providers. It was quite painful to get a prototype working. I will try your platform and would be happy to give feedback.

Nice, I think that's pretty neat. Do you have an idea where to take this further? I.e. for the filesystem it's great but what if you need to touch external systems that keep their own state?

Just enable versioning in S3?

This looks pretty useful. The versioned filesystem part is nice becuase that’s exactly where a lot of agent stuff gets messy fast.

Does this interact with sql or only fs?

If an agent deletes something important (e.g. database), can you undo it? Does it automatically backup before making changes?

What compute resources does the sandbox have? Memory/CPU/GPU?

Interesting. Their versioned storage sandbox seems to be what really sets them apart

Do git and branching fit into this at all?

I'm far from an expert on the field or in computer science, but from my limited perspective I don't see the need for sandboxing - after thousands of claude code interactions it has never did nothing wrong that was serious at all. If I understand this all correctly, lakeFS would be useful for versioning huge dataloads - but it's not my case: for my usecase I use dura and that's plenty, and for more serious projects where I want not only to version changes but also to 'journal' them, I use github. Also I don't understand one thing: this is like a different client? The website shows a screenshot of "Claude Code" that is not claude code at all, or is modified - that's not a terminal. Am I tripping in anything I said?

any chance i can run local micro-VM such as boxlite with this?

I do not get it. If the agent is not mutating state the change can be checked in. If it is mutating external state, version control won't save you.

I implemented something like this in ADK with Dagger, but it misses some important features b/c of BuildKit underneath. The OCI foundations make saving each step as a layer, diff, clone/fork, and time travel easy. The hard parts are security and resource limits.

Glad to see more takes in this space.

Looks promising! I wanna try it!

How does the scale? For example if I were to have hundreds or thousands of concurrent agents running with some parts of their data pulled out of shared state and other parts custom to that particular agent run and I wanted all of this to be preserved for future collective or individual agent use later, is this a reasonable primitive for that problem space? Or is this more for a situation what you have one or a small number of productivity assistance agents that need a sandbox but low data mutation throughput and low amount of concurrent access across different agents?

All these agent offering are missing a use case.

What I would use it for and why?

It reminds me of a blockchain - where it was a solution desperately looking for a problem. What problem does it solve?

Interesting. Literally saw a tweet talking about exactly this last night.

Not sure how I feel about it using on your hosted service, while your home page is asking me for analytics data and only the cli and sdk are open source.

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I know everyones trying to figure out how to make money in this grift economy, but if you're a rational person, you know that it's all a bunch of gambling and tailoring your scope to b2b and ignoring local & open source models and tools, you're more likely going to be part of that permanent undeclass they keep talking about in a self-fullfilling prophecy.