# amazing-sandbox by ashishb

8 Hacker News commenters recommended amazing-sandbox by ashishb and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Developers run third-party code and AI agents inside it to limit damage from malicious packages; the main caveat is that it requires Docker, which uses large images and disk space.

## Why people recommend it

- Used daily for CLI tools and npm (6 comments): "All executions (especially of random third-party code) inside the containers are not inconvenient at all for me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559740)) "have been running LLMs as well as simple tools like linters and even npm inside it for months now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313104)) "All third-party code runs in isolated containers: node/npm, python/pip." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994351))
- Limits damage from malicious packages (6 comments): "So, it drastically reduces the attack surface of running third-party Python/Go/Rust/Haskell/JS code on your machine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512300)) "I wrote amazing-sandbox[1] for myself after seeing how prolific these attack vectors have become in recent years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271159)) "Using a proper sandboxing regularly will drastically limit the blast radius of these attacks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48458852))
- Keeps AI agents to one directory (5 comments): "I prefer running such bots inside a sandbox to reduce likelihood of such incidents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46828268)) "Now, I run agents inside it for keeping my non-working-directory files safe." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597574)) "Sandbox it explicitly to give access to only the current directory" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983810))
- Works on Mac and with VS Code (2 comments): "so that it works on Mac OS as well and can be used for other tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878965)) "That looks really nice, including the VSCode/Mac wrapper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50305838))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amla Sandbox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amla-sandbox.md): 11 recommend
- [Daytona](https://hackerapproved.com/p/daytona.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "amazing-sandbox by ashishb", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazing-sandbox/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).