Developer Builds 20-Minute Disposable Sandbox After Near-Miss With AI Agent Code
A developer narrowly avoided data loss when an AI agent produced a cleanup command that could have wiped his home directory instead of a project folder. The incident prompted him to move all agent-generated code experiments off his personal machine and onto a throwaway server with no credentials, no sudo access, and monitored outbound traffic. He published a roughly 45-line shell script for Debian/Ubuntu systems that sets up an unprivileged user, blocks cloud metadata endpoints, and logs all outbound network connections made by the agent. The setup takes around 20 minutes and is designed to work on any cheap VPS, cloud free tier, or spare device — not tied to any specific provider. The core principle is containment: if something goes wrong, the damage is limited to a disposable box that holds nothing of value.
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