And thanks re: pricing model. It's a start, and we still have a lot of optimizations to go there to make this as cheap as possible, but we think it's a good base to build upon to make agents as efficient as possible compute-wise.

Right now, since these are just linux machines, agents only have access to what you give them. For most development workflows, this means you're putting development environment variables and keys there.

We're also considering having some sort of key storage construct that allows you to require human confirmation for access to certain other keys, but curious if you have any thoughts on what the ideal UX is.

You can of course just build your ideal solution on the template box (perhaps 2 factor authentication via AWS secrets manager to get access to certain keys that require human confirmation), and update your skills. Then all future threads/forks will have access to that setup.

RE: setup required to make a project ready for VM deployment, not sure how complex your app is, but we've found that coding agents do a pretty good job at finding your dependencies locally, installing them on the remote, and ensuring your app runs on the remote end. If you have a few minutes, try out our auto-setup. Most people haven't had to lift a finger to get their apps running in VMs.

The fun thing is that in some way it's a bit inaccurate. We auto port-forward ports from the remote machines to your localhost, so you can still just go to localhost:3000 or whatever, and it goes to whatever machine you have selected in the desktop app. We'll give you a browser in the mobile app too soon to hit "localhost" on mobile.

- A dedicated app where you can scroll through your thread/chat history and start a new thread/fork/VM just by typing a new message, along with access to persistent terminals organized by thread/machine. Push notifications as well when your threads are done. Sort of doable via termux/tmux/ssh/etc.

- It takes a little while to get git worktrees set up well to have multiple threads running in parallel. You have to make sure each worktree starts your app on a different port, for example. But some folks are able to get it in a good place through some manual setup work.

- We started hitting resource limits running 5 full copies of our app on 1 laptop (so each agent can test its work separately), but again, if you have a beefy enough machine this might not be a problem.

- We auto-handle port forwarding for you on desktop (and on mobile soon too). Again, you can finagle something like this with tailscale, but it's a pain in the butt to manually track which thread maps to which port on the same machine. We have some magic where if you select a thread in the desktop app, we automatically remap localhost:3000 (or any other port running there) to that thread's machine, so you can just reload your browser locally to test.

These are a few examples. From building this ourselves, we're pretty convinced that you need some sort of UI to do remote development in a super clean way that feels like localhost. But if you're willing to put in the work, you can probably get relatively close yourself!

You could use VPS, but spinning up and down boxes on inactivity takes a long time, and making changes to the template for new machines is less trivial there. If you're only paying for 1 VPS box, then you lose the "multiple independent machines" benefit, and I imagine things start to get more expensive even in the VPS world when you have 10 of them running at the same time (one per thread).

We recommend you auth with only development credentials (or use something like 2 factor confirmation if you have more sensitive things you want to confirm before the agent accesses), but it's still early for us and we're continuing to refine this as we go. For companies, we're down to brainstorm how they'd like this to ideally work for them. And over the long term we'll support hosting this in your own cloud.

Curious if you have a take on how you'd like this to work from a UX standpoint.

With boxes.dev I've starting pushing agents harder to run the full app and test their work end to end, and send me screenshots as proof. This takes time, sometimes up to 30-40 minutes, but is much more likely to be bug free at the end of the day.

I imagine other players will build cloud support in their own apps, but even now there's a lot of distraction for them. Everyone is trying to still support local execution, which looks really different from cloud. A lot of the labs are taking their coding-focused teams and throwing non-coding on their plates as well (the same app for non-engineers slinging google sheets).

We think getting the cloud experience right for software engineers (as well as companies, with their own hosting/development needs) is going to be really hard, and the problem needs a team fully focused on that. We also think that companies are rightly nervous about putting all their eggs in one basket -- their long term development environment should be harness and model agnostic.

RE OpenCode + self-hosted/local models: definitely. There's nothing holding us back from supporting these since we're just linux machines. But we wanted to start with the most popular harnesses first and go from there.

We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back:

- Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work - It’s 2026, but somehow everyone is still walking around with laptops cracked open or SSHing into mac minis in their garage so their agents don’t stop working. - Mobile is treated like an afterthought even though coding is just texting now We started hitting resource constraints when multiple parallel agents test their own work by running the full app locally. - We tried different products, but couldn’t find any that solved all of our pain points – so we pivoted and decided to just build the ADE we wanted for ourselves.

Boxes.dev is a desktop and mobile app that lets you run Claude Code, Codex (using your subscription!), and the full dev environment for whatever you’re building, all on remote compute. It’s similar to Conductor or the Codex desktop app, except everything is in the cloud.

We use coding agents to scan your local dev setup and port it to the cloud. Then every Claude Code/Codex thread starts from a snapshot of the full setup, with its own filesystem and compute. No more git worktrees, no more cracked-open laptops, and your coding agents can actually test their work end-to-end because they can run your full app in isolation.

We’ve mirrored the Claude Code and Codex UX to feel natural to power users, and also have a fully-featured mobile app (no handoffs or remote control), plus scheduled automations and a Slack integration.

We’re obviously biased, but we’ve been building boxes.dev with boxes.dev for months and it’s honestly been a gamechanger. It’s hard to go back once you realize how much localhost has been limiting you; based on early feedback from beta testers, we’re increasingly sure that cloud is the future of agentic coding.

We’d love for you to experience it yourselves! Would appreciate any feedback – and happy to answer any questions on this thread.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399358

Points: 103

# Comments: 77

The only paragraph discussing encryption is buried in the middle of the article. """ The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials """

The lede did not mention encryption at all: "The attackers in Friday’s terrorist assault in Paris communicated at some point beforehand with known members of the Islamic State in Syria, officials on both sides of the Atlantic say."

https://web.archive.org/web/20151115191248/http:/www.nytimes...