// the find
rivet-dev/agentos
A faster, lighter, cheaper alternative to sandboxes. Run any coding agent inside an isolated Linux VM, with agent orchestration built in.
agentOS is an in-process WASM kernel that runs AI coding agents in isolated VMs inside your Node.js backend — no containers, no separate processes. Cold starts in single-digit milliseconds because there's nothing to boot; the kernel is just a library. Aimed at developers building multi-agent applications who are paying E2B/Daytona prices and noticing it.
The cold-start numbers are real, not marketing — 6ms vs 440ms is the structural difference between a WASM kernel call and provisioning a Linux container. The bindings system (host JavaScript functions callable as CLI commands from inside the VM) avoids the network-hop overhead that makes agent tool calls slow in sandbox architectures. The deny-by-default permissions model with programmatic network control per connection is the right design for multi-tenant agent hosting. The WASM command package ecosystem is genuinely useful — compiling ripgrep, git, jq, and GNU coreutils to WASM is real engineering work, not just wrappers.
The benchmark comparisons are architecturally stacked — comparing 6ms WASM init against E2B's VM provisioning time is comparing a library constructor call to a cloud API. The honest question is whether WASM isolation is strong enough for hostile workloads, and the README doesn't address this. The SDK is TypeScript/npm only; if you're running Python, Go, or anything else, you're locked out of the API — the Rust core isn't exposed. The package table in the README has empty size columns for every package, which suggests the registry isn't fully built yet. And any agent that needs native binaries — Python packages with C extensions, native compilation, browser automation — hits a wall and gets punted to the 'sandbox extension', which re-introduces the full container overhead they're selling against.