1) full isolation (filesystem + compute per thread) 2) agents having a working dev environment that runs our app 3) being able to close our laptops and check in from mobile

The combo of these meant we could fire and forget lot of parallel threads like "root cause and fix this bug: add logging, run app, get a repro, write fix, validate live" or "build this feature, test new workflows live, send screenshots" -- and then come back later to review & iterate.

You can get to a reasonable level of this with locally with git worktrees and the right project setup, but in the cloud you can really fly.

Our bet is that a lot of people will want something prebuilt, and that the last-mile UX for making a good coding workspace (including code review, etc) is actually nontrivial, especially at companies.

Default is 4 vCPU / 8 GB memory but it's configurable at the team/project level (can go higher).

> Is there a way to define the template that's used, so I can say to a new team member, log in to boxes.dev and all the repos and tools are already there for you?

Yes we're moving in this direction! For the current public version each person sets up their box and then agent threads start on a snapshot of that box. But for companies, what you laid out is 100% the vision and coming soon. No more eng onboarding, and maybe even give non-technical folks a default dev environment where they can spawn agents and prototype.

> And where do you get the machines, can we bring our own?

Right now we're using MicroVMs with E2B as our infra provider, but for companies we're exploring how to support bringing your own. Happy to chat if interested!

And thank you!

These can go for many hours from all the manual testing and debugging. Quality really depends on how much you spec things out beforehand, and how you define the test plan / "success" gates. If the agent can't even run the app to test it then things can definitely go off the rails!

Re: web searches -- we're running a full linux kernel and the agent runs on the machine itself, so we can't sleep mid run. But conceptually, moving the agent off-box and sleeping during web searches etc would be interesting, but in our experience coding agents are running enough stuff on the machine itself (rg, bash, playwright, etc) that there wouldn't be much savings.

It's a fully client-side, Tableau-inspired data visualization & exploration tool for CSV / tabular data. I built it around 7 years ago with just ES6 and d3.js (no React etc) but never really finished or "launched" it - perfectionism led to a neverending todo list, and with a target market of only myself I didn't have a strong pull toward solving a real-world use case. I even took some time between jobs thinking I'd build it into a real product, but only managed to burn myself out instead (quite a surprise to learn that could happen on a passion project!)

But it does work - drag in a CSV file (ideally <100MB) and you can make some cool charts and quickly explore a dataset, all without the data leaving your machine. The features aren't very discoverable, but it has stuff like adding derived columns, various fancy charts, row/column sorting, custom colors, etc. I'm sure there are far better tools around these days, but I've still come back to this thing a surprising amount in my day job when I want to whip up a quick histogram or investigate some trend in a medium-size dataset.

Cash works well when everyone has it, but from what I've seen that doesn't happen all that often. Also, you get a lot of restaurants that refuse to itemize the bill (maybe their point of sale system doesn't support it), and sometimes they'll only take 1 credit card. Integration with payment apps is great for that. It goes beyond saving time...an app can help make sure people pay up and the IOUs don't become permanent.

Disclosure: I recently released Grouptuity (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grouptuity), which tries to solve these problems and integrates with Venmo.