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boxd. Composable computers for devs and agents
Composable computers for devs and agents
Your agents need a full computer to do their work. Root on a real kernel, a full Linux toolchain, a disk that keeps what they wrote, and a network they can serve on. 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. It needs that machine to arrive as your machine, composed once and saved whole, with the tools installed and the application already serving. Machines go idle constantly, so waking one has to give back the same processes and the same memory instead of a script that puts the environment together again. 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 in large numbers, 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. boxd machines are built for this.

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

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Compose your computer

You compose the computer. Pick the tools, the integrations, the data sets and the variables, leave your application running, and save that state as a snapshot. Then create 1, 10, or 100 machines from it. Every one of them comes up with all of it already running, in milliseconds, so the workspace you defined once is the workspace every agent starts from. You compose the network under them too. Your machines share one private network by default, and networks narrow that down to exactly which machines can reach each other. Fork one to branch, roll one back to a checkpoint, put one on standby while it waits, hand one to a colleague, or leave one serving your users.

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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. The core features:
  • Snapshots. Save memory and disk as a named snapshot, then create machines from it whenever you need one. Define the workspace once, then create as many as you want, including a snapshot of your app that tracks your latest code.
  • Fork. Copy a running machine, memory and disk included, in under 200ms. The copy arrives with dependencies installed and services already serving.
  • Checkpoints. An undo button for a machine. Save before a risky change, then rewind if it goes wrong.
  • Suspend, resume, and hibernate. Put a machine on standby and resume it in sub-millisecond time. Idle machines hibernate to disk and bill for disk only.
  • Machine sharing. Open a machine to your whole organization with one command, with a clean credential handoff every time.
  • HTTPS on every machine. A real URL the moment your server starts, plus custom domains and as many subdomain proxies as you want.
  • Env vars and secrets. Set them once, and boxd injects them into the machines in the var’s scope.
  • Integrations and automations. Connect GitHub, Linear, Slack or any of over a hundred integrations once, for yourself or shared with your organization, and call them from any machine. A *.run.ts file can run against them on a schedule or when something happens. boxd wakes the machine, delivers the events, retries, and documents each one.
  • Desktop. A live, clickable view of any machine’s display. Watch an agent browse, and take over when it needs you.
  • Machine to machine. Put machines on networks to control which of them can reach each other. Well suited to micro-service architectures and agent fleets.
  • Client utilities. Reach your laptop’s clipboard, files, and browser from inside a machine. See Launch a browser for the machine’s own browser versus yours.

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Use cases

Developers get their own environment. Agents get theirs. Everyone ships faster. What people use boxd for:

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Next steps

Quickstart

Install the CLI and create your first machine.

CLI reference

Review the complete command documentation.