Just 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.
That's fair. What makes this unique is the versioned, composable filesystem. It's built on top of lakeFS (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) so it scales really well, unlike other solutions that try and do this with Git directly.
more 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.
Nice, 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?
In 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?
I 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.
Interesting 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.
I 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?
That's exactly how I tried to address that problem with 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.
Good 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.
Sure! 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.
the 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
2. 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?
indeed - 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.
Interesting. 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.
Fair enough - the underlying technology is indeed open source (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) - the service provides the hosting and tooling to make it easy for consumption by agents.
Thats 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?
The 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.
I 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.
Just 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.
That's fair. What makes this unique is the versioned, composable filesystem. It's built on top of lakeFS (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) so it scales really well, unlike other solutions that try and do this with Git directly.
Agreed. All of these tools promise the world and are so incredibly vague. Actually show me what I can do with it, like hands on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDR8tmes020 - a 2 minute hands-on demo!
more 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.
Kind of sad, because I can't think of anywhere that's replacing this.
Nice, 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?
In 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?
I 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?
just get a $5 VPS or hetzner and you are good.
Exactly that!
Interesting 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.
Much appreciated! and good luck with your project
What’s the best way to give you user feedback? What would be most helpful? What’s your ideal customer profile?
oz dot katz at treeverse.io would be best. ICP is SMB/mid-sized ISVs.
This looks pretty useful. The versioned filesystem part is nice becuase that’s exactly where a lot of agent stuff gets messy fast.
What compute resources does the sandbox have? Memory/CPU/GPU?
Currently a static 2 cores and 4GB RAM, no GPU. Will be configurable soon!
All 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?
Interesting. Their versioned storage sandbox seems to be what really sets them apart
I 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?
That's exactly how I tried to address that problem with 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.
Good 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.
Do git and branching fit into this at all?
Sure! 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.
any chance i can run local micro-VM such as boxlite with this?
not at the moment. You can use lakeFS directly with Fuse-Mount to do something similar with your own compute.
got it, will definitely check it out do you have some performance number of lakeFS in your mind
I 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.
the 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
2. 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?
indeed - 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.
Re 2: how do you rollback the (erroneous) action of removing a db table column and the subsequent data loss from the removed column?
Interesting. 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.
Fair enough - the underlying technology is indeed open source (https://github.com/treeverse/lakeFS) - the service provides the hosting and tooling to make it easy for consumption by agents.
Thats 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?
The 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.
I 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.
What are you insinuating about this particular Show HN?
Sir, this is just one piece of software.