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boxd. Remote development environments
Remote development environments
99.9% of code will soon be written and maintained by agents. They’ll need billions of machines. But machines out there are not designed for this kind of workload. Agents run untrusted code. Each one needs a hard security boundary and not a shared kernel. An agent spawns tens of environments in a single task. So startup has to take milliseconds. It explores in branches. So it needs to fork and snapshot state instead of starting from scratch each time. It needs a full Linux toolchain so it can do everything a developer can. At the same time, a human must be able to go into the same machine and take over. And other software needs to create and delete these machines at scale, so there has to be an API for it. Lastly, agents leave far more machines running than people ever would. So idle has to cost close to nothing. We’ve built them.

The core concepts in 40 seconds: create, fork, snapshots, checkpoints, isolation, and the console.

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What makes boxd different

Every other option asks you to trade away one of persistence, speed, or isolation. A boxd machine keeps all three. On top of this, boxd comes with functionalities that speed up development drastically. The core features:
  • Fork. Copy a running machine, memory and disk included, in milliseconds. The copy arrives with dependencies installed and services already serving.
  • Snapshots. Save memory and disk as a named image, then boot fast copies from it whenever you need one.
  • Checkpoints. An undo button for a machine. Save before a risky change, then rewind if it goes wrong.
  • Suspend, resume, and hibernate. Freeze a machine and wake it in milliseconds. Idle machines hibernate and cost effectively nothing.
  • HTTPS on every machine. A real URL the moment your server starts, plus custom domains and as many subdomain proxies as you want.
  • VM sharing. Open a machine to your whole team with one command, with a clean credential handoff every time.
  • VM to VM. Tag machines to control which of them can reach each other. Well suited to micro-service architectures and agent fleets.
  • Env vars and secrets. Set them once, boxd injects them into every machine you own.
  • Client utilities. Reach your local clipboard, files, and browser from inside a machine.
  • Integrations. Connect GitHub, Linear, and Slack once. Every machine can use them, and the coding agents discover them automatically.

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Use cases

What people use boxd for:

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Next steps

Quickstart

Install the CLI and create your first boxd

CLI reference

Review the complete command documentation