Coding Agent VMs on NixOS 🐘

With the popularity of exe.dev, sprites (from fly.io), and shellbox, one wonders if there is a way to give sandboxed environment on existing, local boxes without having to pay for a cloud hosted service?

Michael Stapelberg lays out one such possible solution using NixOS and microvm.nix.

Another interesting addition to this space is nanoclaw that uses Apple Container to provision Linux containers on MacOS.

Between the two, the microvm.nix is appears to be handy for provisioning reproducible, complex, and repeatable containers (think if you are trying to provision hundreds of openclaws.. say as a service provider), while the nanoclaw, is good for your own personal (1) setup. Apple Container also feels very handy for provisioning throw away containers. The example on the README shows a good example.