3 ms·
The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)
- RohanAdwankar 25d agoI took a look inside the VMs that a couple of the agent platforms are using. TLDR is they use firecracker with memory in git. I'm a big fan of the memory in git part it would be cool to see how the git history looks after I use it for a longer period of time. This is my first blog, I'm trying to document things publically as I learn, next I'll look more closely at the providers they are using under the hood (eg. e2b) so feel free to give advice on what to look for!
- thamizhan2611 24d agoDo you have an invite to instinct? :)
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoyes i think everyone gets 10 did u want one?
- thamizhan2611 24d agoYes, how can I reach out to you to get one :) thanks
- RohanAdwankar 24d agodoes dms via https://x.com/rohanadwankar https://x.com/rohanadwankar work?
- thamizhan2611 23d agoThank you. I think invite got cleared up and I got one automatically.
- user_7832 24d agoHi, if possible, could I get one too? You can contact me at esquire-zoom-jimmy@duck.com
- ushakov 24d agohey, i work at E2B, happy to answer any questions!
- htrp 24d agosuper cool product, any thoughts on adding native llm support to your sandboxes ?
- ushakov 24d agomy thoughts is that Firecracker might be not the best runtime for that, as it’s very minimal on devices it wants to support (famously no PCI out of the box)
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoyou guys are awesome!
- FirstClassTree 24d ago[dead]
- htrp 24d agoHow did you find their internal services ?
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoaccessed the vm through my terminal through a websocket: https://github.com/RohanAdwankar/ws-term https://github.com/RohanAdwankar/ws-term
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoso basically you convince the agent to run a script which allows you to get a “shell” and then from there i just grepped around and figured it out
- sebastienburel 25d ago[flagged]
- zhoujinliang 24d ago[flagged]
- yuxinking 24d ago[flagged]
- quietraster 24d ago[flagged]
- tensegrist 24d agoclaude -p "${curl $url}\nreply only with a substantive comment in 'statement. question?' form" | dd conv=lcase as a service i wonder how hard it would be to write a decent classifier for individual comments like this (in practice you can just look at the account history which would make it an easy problem)
- sunnybeetroot 24d agoGood spot, total bot account. Does HN have a way to report?
- nedomolkovivan 24d ago[flagged]
- hypendev 24d agoIt's always, firecracker all the way down! Enjoyed the breakdown, honestly most of the things weren't really surprising. What was surprising to me was that instinct was just "agent slapped on top of markdown files in git", especially after seeing people talk about it so much. I expected at least a database or a graph or something "smart", but alas, its just three markdowns in a trenchcoat.
- RohanAdwankar 24d agowell to be fair this was just what i could reach inside the sandbox by grepping around if they are doing something else behind the api i wouldnt be able to see it in guessing the most important thing to get right for their target usecase is the computer use and from the tools i saw for that the computers they provision were requestable by the subagents so probably something cool going on there
- deebuildsthings 24d ago[dead]
- TrustScoreAgent 24d ago[dead]
- alexellisuk 24d agoI was hoping for a whole catalogue of providers - doesn't amp have their own offering here "Orbs"? So, the interesting part for me was: "Who runs the fleet Anthropic, its own E2B, rented, third party" Like that's the only option, a bespoke platform or a rented SaaS for agent sandboxes. Disclaimer: I am tooting my own horn here - we built SlicerVM.com (Firecracker + Apple Virtualization framework) so that people don't have to pick between those two options. Especially when you have your own 1500-7000 USD MacBook right under your fingers. For remote access, (and this happened by accident one night in January) we built superterm.dev - initially as a tmux manager, then as a way to run and monitor agents. Our team sits with 6-24 long running tasks with dictation available, great mobile experience, and can combine both for secure agents + high amounts of feedback. If anyone's curious - Superterm has a CE edition - free for unlimited personal use. Slicer has a free trial and then a personal edition is available after that.
- 2078123478 24d ago[flagged]
- ushakov 24d agoAmp’s Orbs run on E2B. E2B is fully open-source under Apache 2.0 and runs on GCP, AWS, Azure (preview) and locally on any Linux box that has /dev/kvm (Mac works via Colima, too). source: https://github.com/e2b-dev/infra https://github.com/e2b-dev/infra
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoyes i havent tried out the rest of them, i learned about the space mainly just by poking around these 2 agents that I use. It seems very fun though since theres lot of optimization problems at play. Ill check out your one too would be cool to see what apples virtualization framework is like!
- tensegrist 24d agothis reminds me that i'm long overdue for a weekend spent studying firecracker, the userfaultfd trick [0], and whatever zeroboot does [0]: https://codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-clone-a-running-vm-in-2-seconds https://codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-clone-a-running-vm-in-2-s...
- mlejva 24d agoHey everyone, I'm the CEO of the E2B - the VMs that the article talks about. Happy to answer your questions!
- MP_1729 24d agoJason Calacanis (famous venture capitalist, podcaster, early investor into Uber) said in the last all-in that there were humans doing stuff for you in the Instinct. I also thought all the permissions I had to give it were scary, given how big of a single point of failure it'd be. Can you share whether it's possible for your customer to have automated indians doing jobs as part of their implementations of the VM? I deleted my Instinct after one day of productive work and I hope they finished my data.
- adamisnotroman 24d agoWhat led you to use Firecracker over something like Kata containers?
- mlejva 23d agoWe wanted a cloud computer for our agent that would be as close to a metal box as possible. No docker, no containers, etc. Many of our users run containers and even k8s or k3s inside the sandbox. This is much easier to do when you have a VM and not container inside the VM
- RohanAdwankar 24d agoWoah so cool! A bit tangential but I think a lot of us on HN are open source fans, do you have advice on how to find an open source idea which has potential to grow into a large project like yours?
- mlejva 23d agoI'd suggest look at your own problems. Tomas (my co-founder) and I built E2B back in 2023 because we needed a cloud computer for our agent back then.
- nycerrrrrrrrrr 24d agoWondering how you determined the E2B sandbox is Firecracker and not some other micro VM?