Era
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 5 of 17 agent sandboxes by recommenders
Open-source local sandbox that lets AI agents run safely, aiming for VM-level security with container-like speed and less overhead than full VMs.
Open-source local sandbox that lets AI agents run safely, aiming for VM-level security with container-like speed and less overhead than full VMs.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 81%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Useful for development and testing
“found it useful for our own development and testing”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Era – Complete Simulated Companies for Your Agents” “really cool idea and really useful in practice”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Era – Complete Simulated Companies for Your Agents” “accurate digital twins for 10s of services”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Era – Complete Simulated Companies for Your Agents” Container ease with VM-level security
“This is a product that tries to get the best parts of both containers (devX + speed) and vm's (security).”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: Era – Open-source local sandbox for AI agents” “a microVM which combines security of VM's + a layer to make it easy and fast like containers”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: Era – Open-source local sandbox for AI agents” Avoids the overhead of full VMs
“built specifically to solve the "LLM hallucinated a destructive bash command" problem without the overhead of a massive VM”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: Secure Wrapper for Coding Agents” “it offers a transparent, lightweight alternative”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Era – A deterministic, non-neural AI that runs on CPU” Thoughtful approach, granular permissions
“it's clear this project takes a thoughtful and well-directed approach”
Comment from 3 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Era – Open-source local sandbox for AI agents” “One thing we spent real time on: granular permission scopes.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “MCP server for personal finance so AI assistants can manage money”
Other agent sandboxes people recommend
The four most recommended other agent sandboxes, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Docker Sandboxes | 50 | 39 | 56% | 9 | — | — |
| NVIDIA OpenShell | 36 | 8 | 82% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Claude Code sandbox | 16 | 18 | 47% | 6 | — | — |
| MXC (Microsoft Execution Containers) | 15 | 17 | 47% | 1 | — | — |
| EraThis page | 13 | 3 | 81% | 5 | — | Approved |
What people said
18 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“really cool idea and really useful in practice”
“found it useful for our own development and testing”
“accurate digital twins for 10s of services”
“I'm personally very surprised by how well it works”
“this worked so well in professional testing of consumer A.I.s”
“this was a really cool experience”
“just found era it's deprecated”
“built specifically to solve the "LLM hallucinated a destructive bash command" problem without the overhead of a massive VM”
“IMO this is brilliant, necessary”
“One thing we spent real time on: granular permission scopes.”
“it offers a transparent, lightweight alternative”
“it's clear this project takes a thoughtful and well-directed approach”
“potentially exactly what I was looking for, thank you for putting it together”
“This is pretty cool, I am literally working on a project very similar to this.”
“This is great, and greatly needed with advanced LLM-assistant working.”
“This is a product that tries to get the best parts of both containers (devX + speed) and vm's (security).”
“a microVM which combines security of VM's + a layer to make it easy and fast like containers”
“I am genuinely confused as to why this needs to be a separate product/service.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.