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Show HN: Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystem
- danielbenzvi 5mo agoInteresting. Their versioned storage sandbox seems to be what really sets them apart
- qudat 5mo agoI don't get it, it looks like they are copying data to the sandbox filesystem why would that impact production data? Because the agent can re-upload the file to s3?
- ozkatz 5mo agoGood question - the filesystem is Fuse-mounted into the sandbox, not copied into it. This way agents can modify data directly simply by interacting with the "local" files.
- afshinmeh 5mo agoThat's exactly how I tried to address that problem with https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox -- you control what network access (e.g. `--deny-net *.amazonaws.com`) your agent has and you also get snapshotting out of the box. That said, using LakeFS is probably a better long term solution and I like this approach.
- cyanydeez 5mo agoI 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.
- yuppiepuppie 5mo agoWhat are you insinuating about this particular Show HN?
- jrm4 5mo agoSir, this is just one piece of software.
- wyre 5mo agoInteresting. 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agoFair enough - the underlying technology is indeed open source (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) - the service provides the hosting and tooling to make it easy for consumption by agents.
- wyre 5mo agoThats a cool project. I didn't scroll down far enough to see that. Thanks for the correction I get providing a hosted service, but I don't understand how it makes it easier for agents to consume unless you're hosting an MCP? My understanding is an agent skill and a cli tool is all an agent needs?
- ozkatz 5mo agoThe repository itself get fuse-mounted into the running sandbox - no skill or MCP required to interact with data: an agent can simply `cat <file>` and use whatever tools they are already good at using.
- esafak 5mo agoI 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agothe repo acts as a source of truth for agents. think memory, data & code. If an agent decides to change any of those, version control allows: 1. to have a human in the loop to approve certain changes 2. rollback changes that end up being incorrect 3. allow reviewing the timeline and history to figure out what changed and how
- esafak 5mo ago2. is false. You can't roll back everything an agent does. If you told it to place a trade in the stock market, for example, you can not undo that. That is what I mean by external state. Everything else is covered by existing version control, is it not? What does this buy over that?
- ozkatz 5mo agoindeed - this only applies to the filesystem managed by tilde. Existing version control is fine if you're only managing code. For data (Think large parquet files, millions json files, images and videos, etc), git doesn't scale well for that.
- bossyTeacher 5mo agoRe 2: how do you rollback the (erroneous) action of removing a db table column and the subsequent data loss from the removed column?
- docheinestages 5mo agoJust 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agoThat's fair. What makes this unique is the versioned, composable filesystem. It's built on top of lakeFS (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) so it scales really well, unlike other solutions that try and do this with Git directly.
- doctorpangloss 5mo agoLLM authored comments are against the rules. I don't think file versioning is differentiated anyway.
- nateb2022 5mo agoOP is actually one of the co-creators of lakeFS, for context.
- hamandcheese 5mo agoIs lakeFS an FS....? Zero mention of FUSE or a kernel module at all in the README.
- rendaw 5mo agoThe title says it's a new filesystem, you either need to use fuse or a kernel module.
- dtran24 5mo agoDo git and branching fit into this at all?
- ozkatz 5mo agoSure! and it's not either/or - you can either import code from GitHub (or any other git remote) into a Tilde repository, or simply clone a repository directly inside the sandbox if you want full control over the git commit/branch semantics.
- pwr1 5mo agoThis looks pretty useful. The versioned filesystem part is nice becuase that’s exactly where a lot of agent stuff gets messy fast.
- nodeflare 5mo ago[flagged]
- digitaltrees 5mo agoInteresting 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agoMuch appreciated! and good luck with your project
- digitaltrees 5mo agoWhat’s the best way to give you user feedback? What would be most helpful? What’s your ideal customer profile?
- ozkatz 5mo agooz dot katz at treeverse.io would be best. ICP is SMB/mid-sized ISVs.
- dorianzheng 5mo agoany chance i can run local micro-VM such as boxlite with this?
- ozkatz 5mo agonot at the moment. You can use lakeFS directly with Fuse-Mount to do something similar with your own compute.
- dorianzheng 5mo agogot it, will definitely check it out do you have some performance number of lakeFS in your mind
- viewhub 5mo agoWhat compute resources does the sandbox have? Memory/CPU/GPU?
- ozkatz 5mo agoCurrently a static 2 cores and 4GB RAM, no GPU. Will be configurable soon!
- viewhub 5mo agoCool. I'll take the API for a spin in the next week. If I use it for my upcoming project, I'll need the ability to control the available CPU/GPU/Memory attached to each sandbox so I can right-size it for the workload. Congrats on the launch!
- kushalpatil07 5mo agoI 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agoExactly that!
- zuzululu 5mo agojust get a $5 VPS or hetzner and you are good.
- stronglikedan 5mo agoinfosec would like a word...
- zuzululu 5mo agowhich is the bare minimum that I hope people are doing , nothing about trusting a third party is any less or more secure.
- keepamovin 5mo agoJust run it on your GitHub actions minutes
- Galanwe 5mo agoSnapshotting a filesystem is trivial with e.g. btrfs. You can hook snapshot creation in your agent. That is a single one liner of btrfs subvolume snapshot, in a single hook configuration file, ready to be valued at $10B as quantum agentic versioned sandbox startup.
- ozkatz 5mo ago
- mc-serious 5mo agoNice, 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agoIn a perfect world, every system and external API would expose a standardized interface for versioning its own immutable state, so you'd be able to rollback and time travel across multiple such systems. Not sure what else we can do in this world other than tightly control outbound requests and provide enough visibility into those requests for a human|agent to try and undo changes. Happy to hear your thoughts - what would you like to see us take this?
- mc-serious 5mo agoYeah tbh I think this might be close to impossible to do as it probably 1) requires alignment that every stateful system needs a rollback capablity 2) it needs to be standardized which will probably take a minimum of 2 years after consensus (and that's probably conservative). I'd love to learn more on how egress can be handled securely in sandboxes, and in general also ingress as this has some security impact - as soon as you allow reading from an external system you open up a new threat vector. Curious to understand whether you have any strategy for network access?
- ozkatz 5mo agoThat’s the current RBAC implementation: agents by default can make no API calls. the only way for them to contact the outside world is through a forward proxy configured in the sandbox. that proxy only allows making requests to destinations explicitly allowed (host, path, method)
- varispeed 5mo agoAll 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?
- zuzululu 5mo agomore 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.
- trollbridge 5mo agoKind of sad, because I can't think of anywhere that's replacing this.
- Karrot_Kream 5mo agotbh I think open internet forums are just dead. It was fun while it lasted but the reason it was good is because of the gatekeeping conditions (not to say that the gatekeeping didn't push away valuable contributors) that kept the internet forums hard to access. GCs, blogs, and small chatrooms are the way.
- zuzululu 5mo agoalready on HN I am seeing a lot of generated or AI assisted comments. on Reddit, sometimes I will engage in a debate then it gets drawn out and I realize I am talking to a bot. perhaps the biggest hit is the trust, now people will just jump to conclusion and say your comment is AI and overall the presence that I used to feel from before the AI days is not there. its no longer rewarding and ironically i've started to engage a lot less and seek human connections outside so perhaps there is an upside. I also see a lot of people cutting back on instagram and social media use. AI appears to be slowly driving people off the internet and towards analog real human connection but its very subtle and too little to celebrate
- Karrot_Kream 5mo ago> I also see a lot of people cutting back on instagram and social media use. AI appears to be slowly driving people off the internet and towards analog real human connection but its very subtle and too little to celebrate I think it was bound to happen. The open internet is like public infrastructure with no janitor. People rant on it, people lie on it, people push zealous activism on it, people send bots onto it. The amount of work it would take to effectively moderate this stuff wouldn't make it economically viable to run any site. You'd need a full time staff just to police this stuff. Small groups are small enough to be moderated by everyone in the group. It might feel sad (it certainly feels sad to me), but I think we should realize we just happened to be on the internet in a weird moment where a high bar was needed to get onto it that happened to align around norms of good discussion. I'm struggling with this transition (because it's hard as an adult to find new places to socialize), but need to ween myself off this site because it's obvious the quality has dipped too low to get much out of it.
- samashton11 5mo ago[flagged]
- redwood 5mo agoHow 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agoit should absolutely scale to that. The filesystem is backed by lakeFS, where every sandbox automatically branches out, and mounts that branch. so you get isolation from lakeFS and the scale of an underlying object store (S3, in Tilde).
- stronglikedan 5mo ago> 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!
- irivkin 5mo agoLooks promising! I wanna try it!
- cpard 5mo agoIt 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agoHey! It doesn't necessarily have to be "data heavy", but any form of state (from code to binary files) that an agent might use for automation. Agents are really good at interacting with files and directories (text in, text out!). This adds a layer for those that allows managing that state in a transactional, versioned way.
- clearstack 5mo agoIf an agent deletes something important (e.g. database), can you undo it? Does it automatically backup before making changes?
- ozkatz 5mo agoIf that database is stored on the transactional filesystem available to the sandboxes, yes! Instead of backing up, it utilizes an efficient snapshot mechanism (lakeFS under the hood).
- clearstack 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- seamossfet 5mo agoDoes 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agoIt uses lakeFS under the hood, so the unit of conflict would be a single file (object, under the hood). Resolving conflicts requires "picking" a winning side, or rerunning a conflicting job. Would you see a use case for merging changes into the same file? Interested to hear about your use case!
- seamossfet 5mo agoWe're building a CAD for drug design, we often have to handle large and highly varied file formats. Protein structures, compounds, python scripts, lab notebook entries, instrumentation data, etc. From a data structure and file ergonomics perspective, think of it as similar to Unity or UE4 for drug design. We have a huge variety of assets to manage alongside their relationships to each other, and the project files are local on the user's machine (with a collaboration / sync over the network between scientists working on the same project, hence where something like this would come in for us). Many of those files are fine with a winning side strategy, but some of them might not be that clean. Take a protein structure defined by an `mmcif` file for example, if we clean the file by removing hydrogen atoms and another scientist repairs a side chain on that same file then we'd need a way to reconcile those differences. On the agent side, our agents will generate small python scripts that manipulate the proteins, then cache and re-use those scripts as tools when possible. So preserving those scripts alongside the mutated asset and conversation history is something we've been working on.
- verdverm 5mo agoI 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.
- anonymousiam 5mo agoBack 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.
- ozkatz 5mo agoOh VMS, How I miss thee
- andrefelipeafos 5mo ago[dead]
- kay_o 5mo agoDoes this interact with sql or only fs?
- ozkatz 5mo agoIt provides a filesystem abstraction, which agents are really good at interacting with. Because it's just a POSIX filesystem - you can put a sqlite database directly on it and get those same transactional capabilities for that too.
- jmull 5mo agoThis 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agoRegarding pricing - that's indeed a great question and we don't have an answer yet. It will very likely be based on consumption and should be competitive to similar solutions. Atomic commits are based on snapshotting done by lakeFS under the hood. Each sandbox run produces a new atomic commit to a hidden "main" branch. Updating that branch is optimistically concurrent, with lakeFS checking for conflicts - multiple writers updating the same object.
- gverrilla 5mo agoI'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 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?
- languid-photic 5mo agoAgreed. As alignment improves, I'm becoming increasingly bearish on sandboxing. Version control and isolation will probably stay useful, though, more for distributed development and workflow reasons than for safety.
- chickensong 5mo agoYou're basically saying there's no need to wear a seatbelt because you've driven thousands of times without an accident. Claude is pretty well behaved, but it's not guaranteed to be safe, especially as you start to hit the gas and relinquish more control. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst and all that. Just because your use case doesn't need sandboxing, doesn't mean there's no need for sandboxing.
- gverrilla 5mo agoI'm not having a debate because I'm quite ignorant of the subject. Just trying to learn from you: wouldn't recoverability and observability suffice instead of sandboxing, if such events are indeed rare? not necessarily for all usecases, but for most?
- chickensong 5mo agoYeah, I'm sure the reality is that a basic setup is fine for most casual development. The average user isn't concerned with security and we've basically normalized data breaches. If you have backups, use git, and manually approve Claude's access and actions, that's likely "good enough". The problem is you start getting comfortable and tired of your workflow getting interrupted when the agent needs more/repeated access. Gradually the permission scope increases, or you decide to take the guards off completely. At this point you have a non-deterministic black box with internet access doing things to your computer. Maybe the agent gets confused and force-pushes git, maybe you load load a malicious plugin, or MCP to github and ingest something hostile. The internet isn't getting kinder, it's basically all-out war behind the scenes, and having your agent do online research is an attack vector. Security is layered, and sandboxing is a layer you can add to mitigate some issues and have piece of mind. TBH I didn't look too closely at the featured product because I have my own solution already, but it sounds like a versioning filesystem is integrated, which can be really handy. Filesystem snapshots are fast and cheap compared to traditional backup/restore operations. Git is a nice layer for text files, but it's slow and not very good for binary stuff, so if you're working with images or 3d models etc, a versioning FS is really useful. There are lots of agent use cases beyond individual coding. Maybe you're building a multi-tenant product that let's user agents do stuff and you need an undo feature. That's probably a good case for a sandbox with versioning FS. Maybe you have an agent handling contractual transactions that can't afford to oops. LLM agents are an entirely new computing interface, so we should imagine wide variety of use cases, some of which would likely benefit from a sandbox environment that versions data.
- skeledrew 5mo agoI 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.
- mdavid626 5mo agoJust enable versioning in S3?
- sahil-shubham 5mo agoNice work on the website! Building something for the same problem but more so from the perspective of self-hostable stateful sandboxes, and not just the filesystem (see https://bhatti.sh https://bhatti.sh). What sandbox solution are you using here?
- arm32 5mo agoYour landing page looks very similar to OP's! I thought it was the same site!
- alexellisuk 5mo agoNot a surprise at all. If you look at https://slicervm.com https://slicervm.com you'll see he's copied our terminal animation from the top of the website. Took out a monthly subscription for 1x month, cloned the majority of the UX/DX and way the guest agent works. Had people reach out and flag it to me and I'm like "yes there's a reason for that".. I think this is just par for the course in an AI slop world. Nothing to stop people imitating, copying, cloning with a good prompt and partial source / detailed docs available.
- sahil-shubham 5mo ago[dead]
- mehmetkeremmtl 5mo agoThe 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?
- ozkatz 5mo agovery very fast: proportional to the count of objects modified, but not their size. Every commit represents a snapshot - an immutable listing of objects that represents the repository. reverting is essentially applying the inverse of the diff introduced by the reverted commit. This is metadata only as the objects themselves are immutable.
- gitaarik 5mo agoWasn't git invented for these kinds of things?
- _pdp_ 5mo agoGit is already versioned, S3 support versioning and any file copied into the sandbox, is well a copy, so I am not sure what is the angle here. Other than that it looks cool!
- gatvol 5mo agoDoesn't s3 now have versioning + POSIX mounts?
- sudb 5mo agoYep! https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launching-s3-files-making-s3-buckets-accessible-as-file-systems/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launching-s3-files-making-s...
- ozkatz 5mo agoS3 offers versioning at the single file level. Imagine an agent dropping a directory with 1m images in it. just figuring out what happened and what got dropped, restoring it one by one, etc. - doable, but ergonomics are a bit lacking.
- otterley 5mo agoS3 Files is not POSIX compliant and doesn’t claim to be so. For example, atomic renames aren’t supported.
- kaant 5mo ago[dead]
- Amber-chen 5mo ago[dead]
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoNice project, but saying "Run AI agents in production without the risk" isn't quite accurate. Even if some tool makes it impossible for an AI agent to delete things in a way that isn't recoverable, there are other risks such as data exfiltration that need to be managed separately.
- jFriedensreich 5mo agoI had to dig hard to find this is a SAAS sandbox offering not an actual sandbox (the software i can use locally). Its just wasting peoples time, no one needs a non opensource sandbox. There are now at least 3 apache 2 projects (smolmachines, microsandbox, boxlite) working on sandboxes and at least one of them should be ready for primetime soon.
- alexellisuk 5mo agoIt's interesting to see this one launch (yes yet another sandbox.. I was getting worried we'd not seen one for a few days) SlicerVM (est. 2022) is already used for prime time, not "free as in beer" but has pretty reasonable individual plans that include all features. Shares the core code with actuated. (Creator of both speaking here) Feel free to take a look and see if gives you a little more than the others you mentioned. If not no problems, I realise some folks prefer free stuff.
- jFriedensreich 5mo agoWhat do you mean "not free as in beer"? Its not free as in anything? Sandboxes need to be open source, nothing else is acceptable.
- kjok 5mo agoWhy should they be open source?
- jFriedensreich 5mo agoSame reason linux or databases need to be open source. A sandbox is not a nice to have or a feature anymore, it is as fundamental building block to running any software. You cannot depend on closed source building blocks, not as closed source product and especially not as open source product.
- HatchedLake721 5mo agoIt’s like saying no one needs Dropbox because rsync exists, or no one needs HubSpot because Salesforce exists.
- foreman_ 5mo ago[flagged]
- whwhyb 5mo agonot to be confused with tilde.club
- egorfine 5mo agoI glanced through the whole documentation, the homepage and the github readmes and still couldn't figure out which OS do they support and how. And this is especially important to know because sandboxing in macOS and Linux have nothing in common.
- kindev 5mo agoWow, I see a lot of potential with this project! Using the filesystem simplifies the integration with 3rd parties significantly.
- grim_io 5mo agoAnother one. If it's not a local sandbox, I'm not interested. We've got enough subscription lock-in from LLM's already.
- MicBook56 5mo agoIt's funny how everyone is converging on similar ideas with AI tools. I did something similar to offload work to cheaper models from claude code when anthropic started squeezing the subscription quota https://github.com/smidy/forger https://github.com/smidy/forger
- tim-projects 5mo agoThis is good and all, but it doesn't stop the agent from deleting you remote github branches, s3 data or potentially gdrive data. Are you able to set access read only? I'd never personally use something like this because I don't see what it offers over doing dev in a linux VM, and setting folders to read only with chattr. Most solutions can be engineered with standard Linux tools.
- k4rli 5mo agoExactly. Having just snapshots of db state isn't that useful, if running ai-slop queries has already triggered actions to external services (example: credit card issuer), warehouse processes (example: shipments, product lines...) , or similar. There are of course some projects where it can be useful, assuming it works properly and that's not a given either when it's vibecoded.
- ajaystream 5mo ago[flagged]
- devoria 5mo ago[dead]
- binyu 5mo agoVery cool. Was this inspired by Cloudflare Artifacts? I'm working on a similar system as the backend for an upcoming agentic coding platform.
- SachitRafa 5mo agoWould be definitely trying this, how do you check the rollback of API calls which would not be an part of a transaction?
- steffs 5mo ago[dead]
- paolatauru 5mo ago[dead]