Treat your coding agents like developers

Finbarr

Author here. Three months ago I posted a Show HN for yolobox [1] - a sandbox for running AI coding agents without them being able to nuke your home directory. Since then I've been using it almost every day, which eventually meant wanting more than one agent running against the same project at the same time. This post is what I learned trying to make that work without it being a constant disaster. The short version: git worktrees are the right Git abstraction and the wrong abstraction for this problem. The unit you want to fork is the developer, not the branch - full folder copy, its own Compose project, its own URL. yolobox now ships a fork subcommand that does this. Happy to answer questions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592344

akurilin

This is great stuff, walking the reader through your thought process was helpful for me as a developer to grok why yolobox was designed this way. I ended up landing in the "just make a local copy, don't get fancy" world myself after many iterations of workflows. Separate agents, separate containers, separate ports, that all resonates. You mention this approach gobbling up a bunch of extra disk space as a consequence of the tradeoffs. Have you considered using APFS cloning on macOS to reduce some of that burden, or is that too tiny of an optimization to be worth it at this point?

tracker1

I think I'd go a slightly different route, if I was trying to do this, and that would be to give each agent at least a VM. Not to mention an email account, so that they can coordinate/collaborate with the other "developers" ... In the end, I firmly believe that agents need a lot more guidance in terms of direction than what a lot of people seem to be giving. Let alone code reviews.