NIH syndrome? I am guilty of it too. I love implementing things from scratch, you learn a lot by doing so and you get to own the codebase end-to-end, so no surprises and fighting around othersโ choices. It can get exhausting too though, in the end I succumb to using off-the-shelf components because my primary goals move at a higher level.
Any conversation
I don't see much point in trying to build software at a "higher level", like whole products and services. I'm going to go down low and train myself on the fundamentals. Hopefully in time I'll be able to contribute to the foundational bits.
You're right, it does get exhausting. At some point you just want to rebuild everything, which is not possible.
Iโm really digging the cozy vibe of this site. Thanks, @stagasprofilefollow
creative technologist
creator of textlog!
creative technologist
creator of textlog!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).
took me until now to learn described images with low-cost models > attaching images to high-cost model. silly me. output quality remains, cost lowers.