4 articles
A self-hosted cloud sandbox platform for AI coding agents, built on Kata Containers. From a monolithic orchestrator to a Kubernetes-native supporting infrastructure, plus a Slack bot and MCP server.
The orchestrator gets all the glory, but it's the proxy, the cache, and the registry that make the system actually usable.
An AI sandbox orchestrator needs more than just an orchestrator. Here's how CLIProxy, shared binary volumes, Verdaccio, and a single Helm chart turn L'Atelier from a VM launcher into a dev platform.
Migrating from a custom Firecracker orchestrator to Kata Containers and k3s. Better portability, less maintenance, and a lot of deleted code.
L'Atelier just went through its biggest architectural shift yet. I swapped a custom bare-metal Firecracker orchestrator for Kubernetes and Kata Containers: deleted 8,702 lines of code, gained portability, and traded sub-second boots for a system I can actually maintain.
Three weeks of daily use revealed the real bottleneck. The dashboard was still one too many clicks away.
L'Atelier now dispatches AI coding agents directly from Slack, powered by an MCP server and a system sandbox running an AI dispatcher agent. Here's how the architecture evolved.
Building a self-hosted Firecracker microVM orchestrator because AI coding agents shouldn't need you watching.
AI coding agents are powerful, but they need you. Approving writes, answering questions, babysitting progress. L'Atelier gives each agent its own VM sandbox, lets you dispatch tasks like a kanban board, and review results from your phone. I built it right before a ski vacation. It worked.