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dbmikusyesterday at 10:14 PM1 replyview on HN

I've been working on an OSS project, Amika[1], to quickly spin up local or remote sandboxes for coding workloads. We support copy-on-write semantics locally (well, "copy-and-then-write" for now... we just copy directories to a temp file-tree).

It's tailored to play nicely with Git: spin up sandboxes form CLI, expose TCP/UDP ports of apps to check your work, and if running hosted sandboxes, share the sandbox URLs with teammates. I basically want running sandboxed agents to be as easy as `git clone ...`.

Docs are early and edges are rough. This week I'm starting to dogfood all my dev using Amika. Feedback is super appreciated!

FYI: we are also a startup, but local sandbox mgmt will stay OSS.

[1]: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika


Replies

xyzzy_plughyesterday at 10:56 PM

This is just a thin wrapper over Docker. It still doesn't offer what I want. I can't run macOS apps, and if I'm doing any sort of compilation, now I need a cross-compile toolchain (and need to target two platforms??).

Just use Docker, or a VM.

The other issue is that this does not facilitate unpredictable file access -- I have to mount everything up front. Sometimes you don't know what you need. And even then copying in and out is very different from a true overlay.

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