I'll be sure to check this out but in the meantime, I'd like to ask: Isn't it generally a good practice to run coding agents in a VM? It provides a security boundary so that the agent is restricted to the VM.
How does this compare? I see it's an "isolated sandbox", but what exactly does that mean?
I spent lots of time on this topic, and had a similar path. Meanwhile the tool also supports a quick way to add custom or local providers to agents: https://vibepod.dev/news/vibepod-cli-0-24/
This looks very interesting, letting people run these in any box they own. I very much agree with the sentiment that there are no proper tools that let you run any coding agent without being locked to a single provider. I just want to run opencode or pi somewhere in a box without having to spin up all of them in my machine, let alone being able to trigger them from within another prouduct as a background agent.
Would pi-pod allow me to standardize pi config on a team/project level so that other people in my org can also use them on the same private infra?
The barrier to create this myself is so low that 1: I can do it and 2: bad actors can do it. I’d like to use a shared tool that will get iterated on, but I just don’t want to risk it at this point given I can get “good enough” doing it myself.
Hi, I think I might be your target audience, I currently run pi on the server in my basement, in a minimalist docker container that gives it access to my code workspace and a config dir. Give me an idea what benefit I get on top of that by using the self-hosted pi pod?
For you the main benefit would probably be portability via the mobile app. The mobile app is not released yet but you can build it yourself from the swift/kotlin source in the github repository.
Otherwise, the main benefit here is for people to be able to clearly define all of their pi and agent config at the org, user, and project level. This most directly benefits teams of people working together, but I also find it helps me as a single user working on multiple projects on multiple devices.
I am developing tarvis.io that allows you to self host apps without managing the servers. In addition to that it also comes with cloud dev env where you can do coding and spawn dev servers and you can host same app in your tarvis workspace as a self hosted app. Tarvis takes care of security, storage, backups and ssl domains. Each app auto gets ssl domain and only you can access your apps. Give it a try!
I am running deepseek harness as self hosted app on tarvis for myself. You can run pi as self hosted harness there too by telling the agent to set it up and then access on the go from the browser.
I use a T3 Code pod in a kubernetes Deployment (sadly no official Docker image), with a PVC so configs and cloned repos survive pod restarts. Seems to work quite well with my Claude subscription (no GPU in my homelab yet)
The main benefits for using pi pod versus running pi on a server is the native mobile apps and environment composability. The cli experience has also been made really nice with pi pod, the tui is rendered locally so user key input does not lag over the ssh connection.
How does this compare? I see it's an "isolated sandbox", but what exactly does that mean?
I spent lots of time on this topic, and had a similar path. Meanwhile the tool also supports a quick way to add custom or local providers to agents: https://vibepod.dev/news/vibepod-cli-0-24/
This looks very interesting, letting people run these in any box they own. I very much agree with the sentiment that there are no proper tools that let you run any coding agent without being locked to a single provider. I just want to run opencode or pi somewhere in a box without having to spin up all of them in my machine, let alone being able to trigger them from within another prouduct as a background agent.
Would pi-pod allow me to standardize pi config on a team/project level so that other people in my org can also use them on the same private infra?
Yep!
Otherwise, the main benefit here is for people to be able to clearly define all of their pi and agent config at the org, user, and project level. This most directly benefits teams of people working together, but I also find it helps me as a single user working on multiple projects on multiple devices.
I am running deepseek harness as self hosted app on tarvis for myself. You can run pi as self hosted harness there too by telling the agent to set it up and then access on the go from the browser.
https://github.com/pkulak/opencrow