seems obvious to everyone around me that sandboxes are on their way out. we hear too many stories about reliability, capacity, broken sandboxes that need manual intervention -- plus they are way too expensive for what they provide.
the future for agents? workspaces.
your agent doesn't need a computer. it needs a place to store it's context, and the *tools* to manipulate that context each turn.
we're in the very early stages of the AI era. the simplest version of this pattern is just handing each agent a time-multiplexed VM, since that's the only thing that we have at hand right now.
over the next 12 months, you're going to see a rapid shift away from this model and towards what i call the "magic compute box".
rather than giving an agent a VM, you give it a set of tools (could be "bash", "python", "js", "read_file", "write_file") -- and you send those commands to a magic service in the cloud that manages to run them for you -- using the cheapest technology available (just-bash, wasm, or even Linux if really required) for each command invcation.
your agent doesn't want a computer that it can set a desktop background for, it wants a place where it can fire off an unlimited number of tool calls and have it update the context correctly.