As a Systems Guy (TM), I see LLMs and agentic coding sparking yet another renaissance in program isolation mechanisms. Two projects, among many, that have caught my eye recently are zo.computer and exe.dev.
zo.computer
Link parkin’: Zo
Zo is a new kind of computer. It’s a personal server, where you can store your files, and connect your tools. And it’s intelligent, so you can ask it to do research, create automations, and build apps on top of your personal context.
- Explore – Craft your personal AI. It can browse the web, edit your files, and connect to your apps. You can even text or email your Zo.
- Automate – Write workflows in natural language for your AI to execute. Run your workflows automatically.
- Create – Use AI to make anything: documents, images, videos, websites… the sky’s the limit.
- Host – Websites, APIs, even self-hosted services like n8n. You don’t need to be technical! Just ask Zo.
Ben Guo added a bit more grandiose aspiration
If you boil down what a tech company is, it’s code, compute, collective intelligence, and agents that act. The future is about enabling individuals to work at the scale of a tech company.
This is the original dream of personal computing, but on a much grander scale. It’s the evolution from Personal Computing to Personal Civilization-Building.
“AWS for your mom” is one of the ways we’ve described what we’re building with Zo Computer. But this only scratches the surface of our vision
…
Our mission is to build a general purpose computational mech suit for everyone. This requires designing enduring abstractions for compute and AI that are simple, last for decades, and enable the individual to harness powers that were previously only accessible to entire technical organizations.
Interestingly, Zo Computer comes across as a bit less hyped than clawdbot, having emerged in roughly the same time frame.
exe.dev
In a Discord specifically for Simon Willison’s projects, one of the developers for exe.dev, Josh Bleecher Snyder, popped up a while ago offering promotional credits. Should have taken Josh up on that.
What’s exe?
exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks, quickly and without fuss. These machines are immediately accessible over HTTPS, with sensible and secure defaults. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc. With built-in optional authentication, so you can focus on your thing.
Your VMs share CPU/RAM—you pay for underlying resources, not per VM. Make a bunch!
crawshaw.io
The developers of exe.dev include David Crawshaw, who’s gotten a bit of attention posting about programming with LLMs and with-agents. That includes some good thoughts in “Eight more months of agents”
Built-in agent sandboxes do not work
The constant stream of “may I run cat foo.txt?” from Claude Code and “I tried but cannot go build in my very-sophisticated sandbox” from Codex is a nightmare. You have to turn off the sandbox, which means you have to provide your own sandbox. I have tried just about everything and I highly recommend: use a fresh VM.
I have far more programs and services than I used to
This is why I am building exe.dev. I need a VM, with an unconstrained agent, that I can trivially start up and type the one liner I would have otherwise put into an Apple Note named TODO and forgotten about. A good portion of the time Shelley turns a one-liner into a useful program.
I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.
Now, where had I heard David Crawshaw’s name before? Ah yes! Crawshaw was intimately connected to Tailscale, and I posted my delight with his LAN manifesto.
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