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Vol. V · The Harness · V.4

Sandboxes and Isolation

Enforce boundaries at the tool and sandbox layer, not by asking the model to behave. E2B, OpenHands, and Deep Agents all say the same sentence.

6 min read

Doctrine

  • Untrusted code runs in a VM or container with no credentials to prod.
  • Network, filesystem, and secret injection are allowlists.
  • Browser-use and computer-use are sandboxes too. Treat them as such.

Where the boundary lives

Deep Agents' security note is the doctrine: enforce at tool/sandbox, not via self-policing. E2B productized Firecracker microVMs for this. OpenHands runs a full desktop in isolation. smolagents without a sandbox is a CVE.

Anti-patterns

  • A shell tool on the developer's laptop with the production AWS profile.
  • Prompt-level 'never delete files' as the only guard.

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