SBPL is great for filesystem controls and I haven’t hit roadblocks yet. I wish it offered more controls of outbound network requests (ie filtering by domain), but I understand why not.
Yes, Safehouse should work for xcodebuild workloads in the way you described - try to run it, watch for failures, extend the profile, try again. Your agent can do this in a loop by itself - just feed it the repo as there are many integrations that are not enabled by default that will help it.
For anyone reading this later.
I read a little from sandvault and they suggest sandbox-exec doesn't allow recursive sandboxing, so you need to set flags on xcodebuild and swift to not sandbox in addition to the correct SBPL policy.
(I don't think sandvault has a swift/xcode specific policy because they're dumping everything into a sandvault userspace. And it doesn't really concern itself with networking afaict either.)
Yes, you're correct about 'no nested sandboxing'.
This also applies to sandboxing an Electron app: Electron has its own built-in sandboxing via sandbox-exec, so if you're wrapping an Electron app in your own sandboxing, you have to disable that inner sandbox (with Electron's --no-sandbox or ELECTRON_DISABLE_SANDBOX=1). In the repo, I have examples for minimal sandbox-exec rules required to run Claude Code[1] and VSCode[2] (so you can do --dangerously-skip-permission in their destop app and VSCode extension)
[1] https://github.com/eugene1g/agent-safehouse/blob/a7377924efa...
[2] https://github.com/eugene1g/agent-safehouse/blob/a7377924efa...