I’ve been spinning up VMs or Docker containers for development. Run the harness inside the VM or container. Note I do this on Mac so the Docker containers are actually in a VM, but standard disclaimers about Docker not being meant for security apply.
Popular harnesses have mature enough remote access features that I can use the same interfaces and even mobile apps.
If you’re not familiar with Docker, you can even have an LLM set up the environment for you and help you start and stop the container. If you do this, be very sure that you switch to having a harness run inside the VM or container, not having the harness on the host machine run commands inside the container. If you do the latter style, it will be running commands on the host which is what you want to avoid.
Docker is nowhere near as secure as a virtual machine, not even close.
I knew someone would respond with this without reading the comment.
I’m on Mac. Docker containers run inside a VM. I said that if you don’t have that situation you need to take that into account.
Docker can be escapable by a determined attacker, but the common compromises you see from packages or downloads aren’t doing complex container escapes. They smash and grab what they can. Docker does enough isolation that they don’t see what they’re after. It’s not as good as a VM, but better than nothing.