Last weeks post about "if you're not using an LLM router, how do you know wtf is going on" inspired me to spin up a couple of OSS options this week and wow were they right.
Any conversation
I've been enjoying toast to help click through a project. I still mostly use Zed to handwrite code, but it's nice to open a pane and fire up toast from the terminal. paradise-runner.github.io/toast/
I read
Still trying to figure out the boundaries of these tools' strengths without outsourcing important thinking, problem-solving, and the collective building-up of a mental model of the systems we're developing.
The shape of LLM tools as toolsโfit for a purpose, ergonomicโis becoming clearer, and human patterns of behavior with them that do more harm than good are also becoming easier to recognize.
Really glad to be using Haskell for work - especially in today's climate with agentic coding.
Our team uses containers to keep our development environment consistent across team members, though, and most agent sandbox approaches want to either offload your work fully to the cloud or they want to sandbox the agent harness process itself.
We're not ready for full cloud based development (yet?) and sandboxing just the agent doesn't work for us when the agent needs to run docker.
... because letting the agent run docker gives them a too-easy escape hatch from their sandbox.
So we're currently stuck with using VMs. This turns out to be tricky but seems do-able.
My current approach is to provision a VM image and use Incus for the execution. My main goal is to keep my current workflow of local/non-agent dev working seamlessly and share the source with the VM/agent.
This means sharing my working dirs with the agent VM but overlaying artifact dirs from VM-owned block devices so we don't take too big of an IO perf hit.
I also don't want the agent to be able to
git push so that means we need some quirky git config to rewrite origin paths and thread through some agent specific PATs ("thanks" GitHub) for read-only repo access. These ALSO need to be threaded through to the development containers - they need to clone private repos.... in the end, this seems to work but I haven't lived with it for long.
There are still some quality of life issues to work out, but I think it'll work out.
At this point, I've removed all coding agents from my host - and that's nice.
Curious, why does using Haskell make a difference here?
It's tangential to the sandboxing topic, really. I started the first post with a broader intent in mind and then elaborated on the sandboxing setup I'm working on.
For AI-assisted coding, though, it's nice because Haskell provides a lot of feedback earlier in the development process compared to lots of other languages. It tends to work once it compiles (obviously not all the time).
You look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress from work. He takes care of his family. Capitalism
@fastidiousprofilefollow
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyersreplied to:
"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." โ Sid Meyersreplied to:Likewise... you look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress for lack of work, or food, or future. He wants to take care of his family. Communism.
We havenโt figured out yet. Maybe we never will.
โฆ
Something like the gcc ai policy. Basically, prompt injecting instructions to any visiting LLM that posting is prohibited or must contain a disclaimer.