Simon Willison investigates using smolmachines/smolv on Firecracker VMs as a secure sandbox for untrusted Python and JavaScript code, avoiding shared-kernel containers. Testing showed strong isolation features including CPU/RAM limits, guest-enforced timeouts, storage quotas, and no-network execution, with cold starts of 0.6–1.5s and warm runs around 50ms.
Background
smolmachines is a project providing lightweight VM-based sandboxes using Amazon's Firecracker microVM technology for secure code execution. The trend reflects growing interest in safe AI agent code execution environments.
- Source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- Aug 20, 2026 at 07:16 AM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10