Where engrams sits.
Hosted sandbox APIs run the VMs for you. Development-environment products give people a workspace at their editor. engrams is the third thing: sandboxes for agents, on infrastructure you run.
| engrams | Hosted sandbox APIs (E2B, Modal Sandboxes) | Development environments (Coder) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | You, in your cloud or on your hardware | The vendor | You |
| Built for | Agents; a person can open a shell or IDE into a session, but the session is the agent's | Agents and code execution, through an SDK | People at their editors |
| Isolation | A Firecracker microVM per session, on KVM | A microVM or container per sandbox, vendor-managed | Whatever the workspace template provisions: a VM, a pod, a container |
| Pause and resume | Snapshot to content-addressed chunks on idle; restore in under 100 ms on the same host, one to two seconds elsewhere | Pause and resume within the vendor's limits and pricing tiers | Stop and start the workspace; state depends on the template |
| Fork | A manifest copy of a few kilobytes; the fork shares every chunk until it writes | Varies by vendor | Not a session concept |
| Agent runtime | Claude Code and Codex mounted by the host at boot; never in your image | Bring your own, inside the sandbox | Agents run as workspace processes |
| Your image | Any Linux image with /bin/sh, built with docker build | A vendor image format or a Dockerfile, per vendor | A Terraform template |
| Cloud | GKE or EKS, GCS or S3, with Terraform and Helm in the repository | The vendor's | Any |
| Product surface | Dashboard, tasks and profiles, Slack, pull request review, CLI, API, connectors | SDK and dashboard | Dashboard, templates, CLI, IDE integrations |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary service | AGPL-3.0 with a paid tier |
Pick the other thing when it fits.
If you do not want to run infrastructure, a hosted sandbox API is the right call: you get sandboxes in a minute, and you pay per second. engrams asks you for a Kubernetes cluster with a KVM node pool, a Postgres, a bucket, and someone to run them.
If the people on your team are the ones who need the environment, at their editors, all day, a development-environment product is built for exactly that. engrams gives a person a shell into an agent's session; it does not give them a workspace.
If your hosts cannot run KVM, engrams has no production mode for you. It does not run sessions as containers.