5 ms·

Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" t

Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine. I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

yoyohello13 9mo ago
> I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments... A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff. Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.
- simonw 9mo ago
  Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
  - indigodaddy 9mo ago
    Not ephemeral, but similar idea to keep things isolated in LXC containers. Disclosure, my project. https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol) Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key. I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced. It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it. I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    If you like juggling, how many tasks in how many epics in how many projects are you working on at the same time? It's not for everyone tho.
  - indigodaddy 9mo ago
    I started working in this for if/when I was taxing exe.dev infra and/or running if I ran out of credits (which actually hasn't happened yet): https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Dude I actually followed you on lowendtalk and I already have this project starred :) Great to see a fellow let user in here xD
      - indigodaddy 9mo ago
        Ah neat! If you have time throw a comment into the LET post, I'd appreciate it. :)
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      This is actually a really great project, I actually wanted to build such a project, I don't know if I already said this comment in LET tho but haha yea kudos for making this!
      - indigodaddy 9mo ago
        Awesome man, it's great to get some positive feedback, appreciate it a lot. I'm actively working on it. Got rid of openhands in favor of Shelley, stuff like that. Stuff that's not tested is like actually taking snapshots thru the TUI, that's there, but didn't actually test/do it yet. Cloudflare API is good but the Desec API feature is there but haven't tested it yet. So I'm sure stuff will come up as more people and I actually start attempting more functionality. The admin.code web UI is neat though where you can start and toggle/choose which coding tool webui is running/listening on 9999 in the container. And also update the AI coding tools thru that webui.
- ljm 9mo ago
  Coming full circle to renting time from a mainframe.
simonw 9mo ago
Claude Code for the web is kind of a persistent virtual dev environment already. You can start a session there and chat with it to get a bunch of work done, then come back to that session a day later and the virtual filesystem is in the same state as when you left it. I haven't figured out if this has a time limit on it - it's possible they're doing something clever with object storage such that the cost of persisting those environments is really low, see also Fly's Sprites.dev: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/ https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/
- esperent 9mo ago
  It's so incredibly buggy though. I end up with hung sessions "starting claude code" every second or third time. After a few times of losing work I'm done with it. I'll check back in a few months and see if it's in better shape.
  - sersi 9mo ago
    I just decided to create a vm for my claude code with strict network controls so it can't access my own internal network and I limit what exactly gets shared to it.
jkelleyrtp 9mo ago
I started building something for the dioxus team to have access to mac/linux persistent and ephemeral dev envs with vnc and beefy cpu/mem. Nobody offered multiplatform and we really needed it! https://skyvm.dev https://skyvm.dev
suninsight 9mo ago
[dead]
toddmorey 9mo ago
I think this is exactly why Anthropic bought Bun!
indigodaddy 9mo ago
I don't know, I've been working on this project [1], and I think efforts around isolating AI coding tool/agents is worthwhile, as most coding people will be using these more focused coding tools vs a vanilla gpt webui. [1] https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
That's what GitHub Codespaces is, and it runs Copilot too (it's just a hosted VSCode Web instance specific to your git repo) Google has Cloud Shell, and Google's AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/) gives you a web-based dev environment with Gemini integration

yoyohello13 9mo ago

> I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments... A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff. Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.

simonw 9mo ago
Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
- indigodaddy 9mo ago
  Not ephemeral, but similar idea to keep things isolated in LXC containers. Disclosure, my project. https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol) Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key. I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced. It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it. I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  If you like juggling, how many tasks in how many epics in how many projects are you working on at the same time? It's not for everyone tho.
- indigodaddy 9mo ago
  I started working in this for if/when I was taxing exe.dev infra and/or running if I ran out of credits (which actually hasn't happened yet): https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Dude I actually followed you on lowendtalk and I already have this project starred :) Great to see a fellow let user in here xD
    - indigodaddy 9mo ago
      Ah neat! If you have time throw a comment into the LET post, I'd appreciate it. :)
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    This is actually a really great project, I actually wanted to build such a project, I don't know if I already said this comment in LET tho but haha yea kudos for making this!
    - indigodaddy 9mo ago
      Awesome man, it's great to get some positive feedback, appreciate it a lot. I'm actively working on it. Got rid of openhands in favor of Shelley, stuff like that. Stuff that's not tested is like actually taking snapshots thru the TUI, that's there, but didn't actually test/do it yet. Cloudflare API is good but the Desec API feature is there but haven't tested it yet. So I'm sure stuff will come up as more people and I actually start attempting more functionality. The admin.code web UI is neat though where you can start and toggle/choose which coding tool webui is running/listening on 9999 in the container. And also update the AI coding tools thru that webui.
ljm 9mo ago
Coming full circle to renting time from a mainframe.

simonw 9mo ago

Claude Code for the web is kind of a persistent virtual dev environment already. You can start a session there and chat with it to get a bunch of work done, then come back to that session a day later and the virtual filesystem is in the same state as when you left it. I haven't figured out if this has a time limit on it - it's possible they're doing something clever with object storage such that the cost of persisting those environments is really low, see also Fly's Sprites.dev: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/ https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/

esperent 9mo ago
It's so incredibly buggy though. I end up with hung sessions "starting claude code" every second or third time. After a few times of losing work I'm done with it. I'll check back in a few months and see if it's in better shape.
- sersi 9mo ago
  I just decided to create a vm for my claude code with strict network controls so it can't access my own internal network and I limit what exactly gets shared to it.

jkelleyrtp 9mo ago

I started building something for the dioxus team to have access to mac/linux persistent and ephemeral dev envs with vnc and beefy cpu/mem. Nobody offered multiplatform and we really needed it! https://skyvm.dev https://skyvm.dev

suninsight 9mo ago

[dead]

toddmorey 9mo ago

I think this is exactly why Anthropic bought Bun!

indigodaddy 9mo ago

I don't know, I've been working on this project [1], and I think efforts around isolating AI coding tool/agents is worthwhile, as most coding people will be using these more focused coding tools vs a vanilla gpt webui. [1] https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

That's what GitHub Codespaces is, and it runs Copilot too (it's just a hosted VSCode Web instance specific to your git repo) Google has Cloud Shell, and Google's AI Studio (https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/) gives you a web-based dev environment with Gemini integration