SmolVM
open-source sandbox for coding and computer-use agents
Details
- External ID
- 47711887
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- SmolVM
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4813624678663239
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
SmolVM is an open-source local sandbox for AI agents on macOS and Linux.I started building it because agent workflows need more than isolated code execution. They need a reusable environment: write files in one step, come back later, snapshot state, pause/resume, and increasingly interact with browsers or full desktop environments.Right now SmolVM is a Python SDK and CLI focused on local developer experience.Current features include: - local sandbox environments - macOS and Linux support - snapshotting - pause/resume - persistent environments across turnsInstall: ``` curl -sSL https://celesto.ai/install.sh | bash smolvm ```I’d love feedback from people building coding agents or computer-use agents. Interested in what feels missing, what feels clunky, and what you’d expect from a sandbox like this.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools for AI agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Model & infra
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- sandbox environment for ai agents
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a lightweight VM/sandbox with snapshotting, pause/resume, and browser automation on macOS and Linux requires low-level virtualization and hypervisor expertise.
What it would actually take: SmolVM relies on OS-level virtualization hypervisors like Apple's Hypervisor.framework / Virtualization.framework on macOS and KVM / Firecracker / QEMU on Linux, written in Rust or Go. The challenging parts are orchestrating memory snapshotting, copy-on-write root filesystems, guest-to-host vsock communication, and headless browser bridge integration. It demands deep systems engineering expertise in OS virtualization, kernel features, and hypervisors.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: nono
Concerns raised: Whether sub-agents spawned in VM get killed by OOM if resource requirements exceed VM allocation, How gracefully OOM situations are handled
Feature requests: Elastic RAM configuration that expands based on usage, Adjustable resource limits for specific use cases
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 102 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #51 of 103 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 134 days after the earliest competitor.
- I'm running parallel Pi agents on a local sandbox · hn · 2026-05-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- Run coding agents in microVM sandboxes instead of your host machine · hn · 2026-04-23 · 63 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Sanbox, batteries included sandboxes for AI agents · hn · 2026-07-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Brig · hn · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Sandbox Agent SDK · hn · 2026-01-28 · 41 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Superserve · hn · 2026-07-21 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Localsandbox · hn · 2026-01-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- We built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVM · hn · 2026-04-22 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a model & infra tool for Fintech yet.