Show HN: Boxes.dev: ditch localhost; run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud
Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work - It’s 2026, but somehow everyone is still walking around with laptops cracked open or SSHing into mac minis in their garage so their agents don’t stop working. - Mobile is treated like an afterthought even though coding is just texting now We started hitting resource constraints when multiple parallel agents test their own work by running the full app locally. - We tried different products, but couldn’t find any that solved all of our pain points – so we pivoted and decided to just build the ADE we wanted for ourselves. Boxes.dev is a desktop and mobile app that lets you run Claude Code, Codex (using your subscription!), and the full dev environment for whatever you’re building, all on remote compute. It’s similar to Conductor or the Codex desktop app, except everything is in the cloud. We use coding agents to scan your local dev setup and port it to the cloud. Then every Claude Code/Codex thread starts from a snapshot of the full setup, with its own filesystem and compute. No more git worktrees, no more cracked-open laptops, and your coding agents can actually test their work end-to-end because they can run your full app in isolation. We’ve mirrored the Claude Code and Codex UX to feel natural to power users, and also have a fully-featured mobile app (no handoffs or remote control), plus scheduled automations and a Slack integration. We’re obviously biased, but we’ve been building boxes.dev with boxes.dev for months and it’s honestly been a gamechanger. It’s hard to go back once you realize how much localhost has been limiting you; based on early feedback from beta testers, we’re increasingly sure that cloud is the future of agentic coding. We’d love for you to experience it yourselves! Would appreciate any feedback – and happy to answer any questions on this thread.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
iloveluce
Interesting. Given that OpenAI and Anthropic are steadily moving down the stack (e.g. remote execution, Codex desktop, Claude Code integrations), how do you think about defensibility? Do you expect the labs to eventually offer a cloud-native ADE themselves, and if so, what advantage do you think an independent platform retains? Also, do you see Boxes supporting OpenCode and self-hosted/local models in the future? If the rented machines have enough RAM and GPU access, it seems like there could be an interesting path toward a model-agnostic platform rather than being tied to the frontier labs.
indigodaddy
I might use this if it supported any old cloud or VPS, and was at most $10/mo. The fact that you have decided that this platform should only live in your own custom cloud is unappealing to me. Or, open source it and let us run it on our own VPS and keep your expensive cloud for those who want to pay. As it stands would never consider it.
cohix
I really like the pricing model and focus on not shafting people by auto-sleeping when an agent is done working. I’ve been working on an [OSS TUI]( https://github.com/prettysmartdev/awman ) for managing agent execution and workflows in containers (local or remotely) and would love to collaborate if you’re interested.
__natty__
Maybe I’m naive but the longest single workflow I ran was maybe 15 minutes. How do you steer agents to run “overnight”? And what is the quality of such execution?
Bnjoroge
What are “box-hours”? Regular hours just running in boxes? Do I get charged the same when 1)the agent is doing some external thing say web search that takes a while, and 2) when the agent isnt running(say waiting for my input)?
pavelpilyak
How does this handle MCP credentials - both for stdio servers that read tokens from local config, and for HTTP ones where harness holds an OAuth token? Either way those secrets end up in your cloud? Curious what the security model is
servercobra
Nice, this looks exactly like what I've been looking for. I tried Fly.io Sprites and it _almost_ got me there, but I got annoyed logging into my CC every new feature. Unfortunately I wound up going all in on Cursor Cloud Agents, which overall has been decent.
ai_slop_hater
> ditch localhost; run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud Why would I want this and not the other way around?
amirhirsch
This looks very clean, great job! If your CTO didn't spend the past year making an orchestration tool and a baby is he even qualified? I have a vibe-coded orchestrator that I use to manage my claude and codex sessions across multiple machines, can also spin up sprites from fly. https://github.com/tinkerer/propanes warning: it is probably totally unsuitable for anyone else to use except for me The main idea is a widget that you embed in your apps that lets you select elements, paste screenshots, and prompt what to change. This workflow is very productive for me. I would encourage everyone to add element selection to their orchestrators prompt composers. If you watch the looms on the readme note that my CLAUDE.MD calls me a Meat Computer and reminds me to hydrate. I have a native tauri version that lets you select UI elements through the macos accessibility api too. The session service uses tmux so you can open a native terminal via ssh and tmux attach. I add a ton of features that are in varying degrees of half-baked: the "brainstorm" mode allows you to do microphone transcription while interacting with the DOM and it will suggest tickets automatically. I've also been working on "bd2sdd" which is supposed to take your strings of user inputs and transform it into a spec, presumably because I also desired regressions. There are Wiggums (which aren't relevant anymore with /goal) and "FAFO swarms" (fan-out, aggregate, filter, optimze) which I use to reverse engineer other pieces of software, PowWow for codex and claude to work together. I stole the structured views and remote session control from my friend's Agent Portal project txcl.io which is more fully-baked and narrower scope than propanes. The ticketing system / tmux / structured views has been slowly evolving into multi-agent chat with a primary "Chief of Staff." It integrated pretty nicely into Slack.
pickleglitch
You can pry localhost from my cold dead hands.
peterldowns
What kind of cpu/memory do the vms get? Is there a way to define the template that's used, so I can say to a new team member, log in to boxes.dev and all the repos and tools are already there for you? And where do you get the machines, can we bring our own? The orchestration layer and product experience ticks all the boxes for me but where Codex, Claude, and Cursor have fallen down for me in the past is: - slow and outdated vms - horrible/no way to standardize environments for my team - no way to bring our own compute to help resolve these issues ^
soco
It feels somehow weird to see a cloud tool usable only from Macs. Oh well.
maCDzP
I run Claude Code on my VPS and do /rc to run from my mobile. It’s really handy.
drnick1
Why is this better than running Claude on my own home server? I can remotely monitor the agent with Termux from my phone.
astrochicken
Nice design. I love the added mobile app.
2001zhaozhao
Really cool tool! I am building a self-hosted tool (OpenClaw-like) to solve the same problem (running agents 24/7 and access from monile), which I think is the main alterative approach to cloud tools. I'm glad that other people have recognized the problem. We currently use worktrees btw. We have a port allocation system that sends ports to the agent automatically, which suffices for smoke testing web projects in parallel but requires some configuration. We've also found that asking agents to find a free port works as well. There's no way to get security-relevant isolation without a containerized system, but everything else can be worked around, and IMO more easily than the setup required to make a project ready for VM/container development.
wmedrano
Well, I wouldn't use this since I have my own box. In case its useful: - I run hermes on the box and it has some scheduled cron jobs. - I gave it an account on a custom Git forge. It cannot commit without my direct permission, though it can blow the setup up in other ways lol. - I interact by assigning it issues and talking through Discord.
imoreno
Don't Anthropic and OpenAI both offer the same thing built in? What are the difference with this service?
bruckie
What's the security story? I would love to adopt cloud dev environments that are constrained enough that I can safely run agents in YOLO mode, but not so constrained that they are useless. I would want it to be safe enough to run 80 to 90% of typical development work without supervision, and then have an escape hatch that allows doing other things with human supervision. edit: and if anyone knows of an existing service that has these properties, I'd love to know about it.
sntran
It would be nice if there is an extension for VSCode or its forks that let you monitor your agent *running inside* your local machine, or VSCode adds support for it. I want to run agents on the codes I have open, not pushing them to a cloud "box" to run agents on there. But I do like being able to monitor or pick up the next steps from my phone. Last time I tried to let AI build such extension, it told me that VSCode did not expose extension API to monitor AI chat.