Everyone’s Building a Sandbox Company—the Pain Falls on the People Stitching Together Interfaces for Agents

To run code for AI agents, sandboxes are unavoidable infrastructure. Jalil from OpenWork (@getopenwork) has launched a project called Differently, positioned as The Sandbox Gateway. The motivation is very concrete: while building sandboxes for agents, the team kept having to stitch together different sandbox providers. Anyone who has built an agent execution environment has probably run into this: vendor A has one API, vendor B has one permission model, vendor C has one billing system—and every time you switch backends, you have to rewrite the adaptation layer.

The video has a white background; next to a lock icon in the upper left are the words “differently” and “open source,” and in the center is a line of black uppercase English: Everyone's building a sandbox company. Placed in a project launch, that line is a bit barbed. There are more and more sandbox companies, yet things haven't gotten easier for users—interface fragmentation has already taught everyone a lesson.

Differently’s approach is to provide an open-source API that covers sandbox backends such as microVM, OpenSandbox, Daytona, Boat, and Freestyle. The direct value for developers is less stitching: the agent side should talk to just one interface as much as possible, while backends can be switched among the listed services. For general readers, a sandbox can be thought of as a disposable workspace for an agent, where code and tool calls run without failures affecting the outside. A microVM is a lighter-weight isolation unit, commonly used in this kind of execution environment.

Some caution is warranted. The materials don't provide latency, isolation strength, billing, stability, or production case studies; whether a unified API can hold up long term will depend on coverage and backend quality. What it addresses first is the concrete pain point from the tweet: the team no longer wants to maintain a separate set of glue code for every sandbox vendor.

The project is called Differently, it's open source, and the entry point is the original tweet: https://x.com/reachjalil/status/2115594859298033862. For specific integration details, see the project documentation; the materials here do not lay out commands or configuration.

The line “Everyone’s building a sandbox company” can serve as a footnote to the industry. After the supply explosion, the integration layer has become the new bottleneck. Differently is betting on exactly that position: it isn't competing with sandbox companies for the backend; it first connects the backends together. Whether it succeeds is another question; at least the pain point is real.