Posted by emilburzo 1/20/2026
There was this HN post[0] last week on a tool for automatically shutting down the codespace container when idle.
This seems like a very hard problem with coding specifically as you want unsafe content (web searches) to be able to impact sensitive things (code).
I'd love to find people to talk to about this stuff.
I do agree with the security / cautionary comments and wouldn't leverage this setup outside a hacked together homelab.
There's not a tonne of tooling for that use case now, although it's not too hard to put together I vibe-coded something that works for my use case fairly quickly (CC + Opus 4.5 seemed to understand what's needed)
Even with npm/pip, these may not be available on a base linux box.
Even then, some complex projects may need other tools that are not part of a base system (command line tools, redis, ...).
With these powers there's a lot less back-and-forth with me running commands, copying the output, pasting it to Claude, etc.
I'm sure you've had the case where you had to instruct someone to do something (e.g. playing tech support with family, helping another engineer, etc). While it helps the other person learn, it feels soooo slow vs just doing it yourself :) And since I don't have to teach the agent, I think this approach makes sense.
just give it its own machine and let it check out any code
I PXE boot it from a known image when I feel the need
Could do the same thing on EC2 of course.
And setup an .env for the project with user/password to access only a dev database.