Comment by mazieres
20 hours ago
It's a good point. Maybe I should add an option to make certain directories read-only even under the current working directory, so that you can make .git/ read-only without moving it out of the project directory.
You can already make CWD an overlay with "jai -D". The tricky part is how to merge the changes back into your main working directory.
This is the problem yoloAI (see below comment) is built around. The merge step is `yoloai diff` / `yoloai apply`: the agent works against a copy of your project inside the container, you review the diff, you decide what lands.
jai's -D flag captures the right data; the missing piece is surfacing it ergonomically. yoloAI uses git for the diff/apply so it already feels natural to a dev.
One thing that's not fully solved yet: your point about .git/hooks and .venv being write vectors even within the project dir. They're filtered from the diff surface but the agent can still write them during the session. A read-only flag for those paths (what you're considering adding to jai) would be a cleaner fix.
It's great that you have -D built into the tool already. That's a step in the right direction.
I don't think the file sync is actually that hard. Famous last words though. :)
Not famous last words ;-)
I've already shipped this and use it myself every day. I'm the author of yoloAI (https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai), which is built around exactly this model.
The agent runs inside a Docker container or containerd vm (or seatbelt container or Tart vm on mac), against a full copy of your project directory. When it's done, `yoloai diff` gives you a unified diff of everything it changed. `yoloai apply` lands it. `yoloai reset` throws it away so you can make the agent try again. The copy lives in the sandbox, so your working tree is untouched until you explicitly say so.
The merge step turned out to be straightforward: just use git under the hood. The harder parts were: (a) making it fast enough that the copy doesn't add annoying startup overhead, (b) handling the .pyc/.venv/.git/hooks concern you raised (they're excluded from the diff surface by default), and (c) credential injection so the agent can actually reach its API without you mounting your whole home dir.
Leveraging existing tech is where it's at. Each does one thing and does it well. Network isolation is done via iptables in Docker, for example.
Still early/beta but it's working. Happy to compare notes if you're building something similar.