boat

boat is a cloud sandbox product from ASCII that provides persistent Ubuntu virtual machines for long-running AI agents, programmatic use, and humans. Each sandbox offers SSH/SCP access, Docker inside the VM, a dedicated IP, a 60fps virtual desktop with browser, and snapshot-based forking. It is controlled through a CLI, an HTTP API, and Python and TypeScript SDKs.

What It Is

boat is a sandbox and cloud-VM service for agent workloads. A sandbox is a full Ubuntu machine, so Docker, systemd, databases, and cron run as on a normal dev machine. Docker, VS Code, Chrome, Ghostty, the GitHub CLI, Rust, Node.js, and Bun come pre-installed, and agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode can be run inside.

Workflow and Commands

The CLI covers the sandbox lifecycle: boat new creates a sandbox and returns a desktop stream, a hosted URL, and a machine IP. Other commands include boat ssh/scp, boat exec, boat prompt (run Claude Code or Codex inside), boat events (poll agent messages and tool calls), boat host (public HTTPS URL for a port), boat desktop, boat fork, and boat stop/resume. Stopping snapshots the sandbox; files, installed packages, and enabled systemd services survive, while hand-run processes need a restart. Further features include named snapshots, port forwarding, webhooks, API keys, secrets, teams, and auto-stop. Any command accepts --json for JSONL output.

Deployment and Limits

Sandboxes run in EU regions (Germany, Finland, France). Sizes are small (2 vCPU/4 GB), default (4 vCPU/8 GB), and large (8 vCPU/16 GB). The default sandbox TTL is 1 hour and can be overridden. The vendor publishes its own benchmark and price comparisons against other sandbox providers; these are vendor claims. The homepage states boat is backed by Y Combinator.