Tangentially, I've been investigating the last few days on how to setup a separate Linux box as an agent "playground". I got a mac mini to use as my own personal driver and now my Linux box is free, so I want to have a local setup where I keep my personal machine a bit stricter while giving near free-reign for agents on the Linux machine.
It is like a locally-hosted version of these commercial projects. But I'm doing it ad-hoc. This seems like a space that should be filled by open source. What are the options that exist now? I have pro plans for both Codex and Claude Code and enough credits to run a couple instances of each. I want to control them from the mac mini over a tailnet. What options exists now?
I've been working on this open source project for a few months, but just put up a product website today, actually: https://yaac.dev/
You can run the agents either sandboxed (in kubernetes via kind) or containerless ("free reign", perhaps) on the Linux box, and host them on your tailnet. The desktop app gives you either a chat or terminal interface, and you can access them via the browser (e.g. on mobile), too.
One limitation is that it assumes you're working with a github repo, and each agent session gets its own clone to work with. Feel free to shoot me an email (link in github) with any questions or specific needs and I'd be happy to try to help you.
I currently have a few VMs in a Proxmox cluster that serve as sandboxes, talking to various inference machines, all self-hosted (so I don't have to worry about having "enough credits" either).
Use smolvm, support for tailscale in each VM.
https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
A self-hosted cloud offering is very close to what I was thinking of from a commercial offer. It is also the least documented, which makes sense. I'm guessing what I am trying to do is the niche case and most devs will either want to run on their local machine and/or a cloud. Therefore a commercial offering is obviously going to want to support local while providing a low-friction on-ramp to their commercial cloud product.
Agent Substrate from google if you wanna go hardcore, although it adds quite a bit of complexity and management that you probably don't want if it's just a personal setup - https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
Docker with tailnet is probably good enough for your usecase.
I did some investigation into podman since I'm on Fedora and my limited understanding is that it is a bit more lightweight and less tied to the commercial Docker offering. My conclusion was that even that was a bit more than is actually needed. Both Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 suggested just to set up a single `agents` user on the box that both use and put things like shared dev credentials into a ~/.config/agents subfolder.
But there are many tiny details to the whole setup. Like, making sure services start at boot instead of login. And adding isolation to dev resources (I mostly use Postgres and Redis) to avoid agents stepping on each other. There's also things like setting up GitHub Apps so that attribution works well. And then there are the "remote control" features of Claude vs. a persistent tmux I can ssh into. I've could go on, but I think most people will get the point.
I'm actually surprised I don't see more discussion about this from devs.
https://pleasedonotescape.com/
I recommend "byre" from that list, because I built it. You can inject credentials you want into it, but it can't touch the host. I run all my coding harnesses inside it. At the end of the day, it's a flexible and reusable way of spinning up Docker containers designed for agents.
Thank you for the resource, this kind of aggregation is very useful.
On a quick skim you have categories: Local, vendor-managed, Hybrid. I am looking for something in-between local and vendor-managed. In a sense, I want the separate box to be the sandbox, rather than have a sandbox on my local machine isolated using a container or VM. That is a bit different of a setup with its own constraints that things like VMs or containers don't directly address.