Replit rebuilt its sandbox engine with microVMs

Replit intrigues me. Other than Paul Graham talking it up a lot on Twitter - I've never once heard of anyone using it, seen any chatter about it in any or our internal slack forums. Every other AI company I get barraged with- no matter where I go, even antigravity/gemini carbon/argon/models/etc... - which nobody I know uses either - but at least I hear about them a lot.

I wonder what ecosystem replit exists in that seems to completely not overlap with any of the other AI technologies and companies....

My read on this is they re-invented the OTP supervision tree, process isolation, hibernation, and actor-to-actor message passing, but had to push the isolation boundary all the way down into Ring -1 (KVM/Cloud Hypervisor) and customized Linux tinyconfig kernels because their "actors" are actively trying to jailbreak the hypervisor.

Is that about right?

It's only somewhat related to the article, but:

How do people feel about the hardware isolation provided by microVMs versus strong software isolation techniques like gvisor?

Right now, we put a huge amount of stock in "hardware isolation". If that starts falling to agents to any substantial degree, I wonder whether we might end up seeing a transition toward patchable software isolation, similar to the rise of software RAID that occurred a while back.

MicroVMs are quite popular nowadays due to sandboxing but we need to also keep in mind least privilege principle. Applying that is also tricky.

This Replit? https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

I do hope nobody reading this copies any of Replit's design decisions or architecture, lest they get threatened.

I avoided reading the piece, just in case.

Guys. You could do the same with ansible like decade ago.

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