Zed and Val Town devs debate persistent VMs vs ephemeral sandboxes for AI agents
zeeg · x · 2026-10-11
Nathan Sowders (zeeg), author of Zed, and David Crawshaw debate how to set up dev environments for AI agents. Crawshaw keeps a persistent base VM with a systemd timer warming its build cache, forking ephemeral VMs like git branches for changes; he argues persistent VMs + agents shine for small software built and run in prod on a single VM.
Related event: Debate: Persistent VMs vs Ephemeral Sandboxes for AI Agents(5 posts)→
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