9 Sandbox

Running software on your machine has always carried with it some risk: viruses, trojans, malware, ransomware and whatnot coming along for the ride. Recently, there have been supply chain attacks across the spectrum: popular projects on GitHub, name- and typo-squatting or account takeovers on npm, the Arch Linux AUR etc. Though problematic, there are mitigations that you can employ against each of these risks.

I have been using coding harnesses for a while now, and doing so directly on the dev machine. And I am not alone. This sounds insane, given the risks cited above, in this age of VMs and containers. But convenience outweighs the risk of catastrophe every single time.

Earlier this year, when OpenClaw was everywhere, I briefly considered agents and even built my own runtime called Sēvaka: a secure execution runtime for autonomous AI workers. It had a lot of features including taints: the ability to tag the source of data and prevent it from crossing specified boundaries. But I lost interest in it after the proof of concept was done.

More recently, though, I decided I wanted something far more mundane: the ability to run pi in a sandboxed environment. I didn't want the complexity of Docker or Podman. So I went searching. And discovered Bubblewrap.