Yea I've been running claude and codex with full permissions for a while but it has always made me feel uneasy. I knew it was fairly easy to fix with a docker container but didn't get around to it through sheer inertia until I built this project.

No I haven't and that's interesting. Part of the yolobox project is an image that you may find useful. Comes preinstalled with leading coding agent CLIs. I'd like to make the ultimate vibe coding image. Is there anything special you're doing with the images?

Absolutely! Let me know if you have any feedback.

Neat project! Sounds like it has a very different ethos to mine though:

> This container mounts a read-only copy of your current path at /src as a non-root user and restricts network access to a select list of http and https destinations. All other network traffic is blocked.

Yolobox mounts the current directory in read-write, the default user has sudo, and there's full network access by default. You can disable network access with `yolobox --no-network` if you want.

Interesting to learn about other related tools. I built a similar variant called ctenv (https://github.com/osks/ctenv). Focused more general containers and not specific to agents, but I'm using it for that via its configurability.

One thing I wanted was to use any image in the container, which shai also seem to support in the same way (mounting a custom entrypoint script). And same reason for not using devcontainers - make it easy to start a new container.

I'm one of the creators of shai. Thanks for the callout!

Interesting to see the work on Yolobox and in this space generally.

The pattern we've seen as agent use grows is being thoughtful about what different agents get access to. One needs to start setting guardrails. Agents will break all kind of normal boundaries to try to satisfy the user. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it's problematic. (For example, most devs have a bunch of credentials in their local env. One wants to be careful of which of those agents can use to do things).

For rw of current directory, shai allows that via `shai -rw .` For starting as an alternative user, `shai -u root`.

Shai definitely does have the attitude that you have to opt into access as opposed to allowing by default. One of the things we try to focus on is composability: different contexts likely need different resources and shai's config. The expectation is .shai/config.yaml is something committed to the repo and shared across developers.

Could do but part of what I find super useful with these coding agents is letting them have full sudo access so they can do whatever they want, e.g., install new apps or dependencies or change system configuration to achieve their goals. That gets messy fast on your host machine.

Yeah that's similar to my approach.

I created a non-admin account on my Mac to use with OpenCode called "agentic-man" (which sounds like the world's least threatening megaman villain) and that seems to give me a fair amount of protection at least in terms of write privileges.

Anyone else doing this?

EDIT: I think it'd be valuable to add a callout in the Github README.md detailing the advantages of the Yolobox approach over a simple limited user account.

Good feedback, thank you. We expanded the README: https://github.com/finbarr/yolobox/commit/ad776012f82f9d67e1...

Yes, with some niceties around coding agents preconfigured.

This is a good question and something I explored a little. I’ll need to do further research and come back on what the best option is. There’s a way to give a docker container access to other docker containers but it can open up permissions more than might be desired here.

Interested. I'm on linux now for 20 years but i never heard of bubblewrap :D. I currently run OpenCode in Docker but i always assumed there was a better way. So bubblewrap and your script seams like the perfect fit.

They've made some attempts at this already and none of them work quite the way I'd like. This is an opinionated take. I want the agents to have max power with a slightly smaller blast radius.

Claude Code here. The main differences:

Scope: yolobox runs any AI coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI) in a container. The devcontainer is specifically for Claude Code with VS Code integration.

Interface: yolobox is CLI-only (yolobox run <command>). The devcontainer requires VS Code + Remote Containers extension.

Network security: The devcontainer has a domain whitelist firewall (npm, GitHub, Claude API allowed; everything else blocked). yolobox has a simpler on/off toggle (--no-network).

Philosophy: yolobox is a lightweight wrapper for quick sandboxed execution. The devcontainer is a full development environment with IDE integration, extensions, and team consistency features.

Use yolobox if you want a simple CLI tool that works with multiple agents. Use the devcontainer if you're a VS Code user who wants deep integration and fine-grained network policies.

Your OS, editor, and compiler will (to a reasonable degree) do literally, exactly, and reproducibly what the human operating them instructs. A LLM breaks that assumption, specifically it can appear, even upon close inspection that it has in fact done literally and exactly what the human wanted while in fact having done something subtly and disastrously wrong. It may have even done so maliciously if it's context was poisoned.

Thus it is good to specify that this commit is LLM generated so that others know to give it extra super duper close scrutiny even if it superficially resembles well written proper code.

Just ask Claude Code to make the commit. My workflow is to work with agents and let them make changes and run the commands as needed in terminal to fully carry out the dev workflow. I do review everything and test it out.

Tenet