Show HN: Sandbox Agent SDK – unified API for automating coding agents (github.com)

41 points by NathanFlurry ↗ HN
We’ve been working with automating coding agents in sandboxes as of late. It’s bewildering how poorly standardized and difficult to use each agent varies between each other.

We open-sourced the Sandbox Agent SDK based on tools we built internally to solve 3 problems:

1. Universal agent API: interact with any coding agent using the same API

2. Running agents inside the sandbox: Agent Sandbox provides a Rust binary that serves the universal agent API over HTTP, instead of having to futz with undocumented interfaces

3. Universal session schema: persisting sessions is always problematic, since we don’t want the source of truth for the conversation to live inside the container in a schema we don’t control

Agent Sandbox SDK has:

- Any coding agent: Universal API to interact with all agents with full feature coverage

- Server or SDK mode: Run as an HTTP server or with the TypeScript SDK

- Universal session schema: Universal schema to store agent transcripts

- Supports your sandbox provider: Daytona, E2B, Vercel Sandboxes, and more

- Lightweight, portable Rust binary: Install anywhere with 1 curl command

- OpenAPI spec: Well documented and easy to integrate

We will be adding much more in the coming weeks – would love to hear any feedback or questions.

6 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 24.1 ms ] thread
For the newly initiated - can you help explain some common use cases? I’m not sure I fully grok practical usage of this
Can I think of it as ACP(agent-client-protocol)-over-HTTP? I know ACP is an editor-oriented local protocol, but I think it's similar to the design idea of this project.
That's correct.

As you said – in terms of project goals, the biggest difference is:

- ACP seems to be focused on providing a universal API for the subset of features required for editors

- Sandbox Agent SDK is focused on automating agents, so aims to provide a much more comprehensive API coverage for niche agent-specific features

We maintain a feature coverage matrix (https://sandboxagent.dev/docs/session-transcript-schema#cove...) – it's early, much more coming soon.