I guess I enjoy solving problems, and recognize that the devil is always in the details, so I don't get much satisfaction until I see the whole stack working in concert. I never had much esteem for "architects" who sketch some blobs on the whiteboard and then disappear. I certainly wouldn't want to be "that guy" for anyone else, and I'm not even sure I could do it to an LLM.

So are Cygwin and WSL, though, for those who don't already have the luxury of being on Linux or UNIX (incl. MacOS). I'm sure there are uses for running full-system emulators inside a browser, but access to bash and sed and gawk doesn't seem like one of them. Seriously, if that's the best way to get access to good text manipulation tools, why aren't you ditching your entire OS?

I agree, bash, sed, etc. are great, but a VM running inside a browser seems like the least efficient way to access them. Even if you're stuck on Windows, Cygwin has been a thing for 30 years now, and WSL for ten or so? There should be plenty of ways to set up a sandbox without having the simulate an entire machine.

It sounds like what you're really trying to recreate is the Software Tools movement from 50 years ago, where there was a push to port the UNIX/BTL utilities to the widest possible variety of systems to establish a common programming and data manipulation environment. It was arguably successful in getting good ports available just about anywhere, evolving into GNU, etc., but it never really reached its apotheosis. That style of clear, easy-to-read-and-write software was still largely killed off by a few big industry players pushing a narrative that "enterprise" has to mean relational databases and distributed objects. It would be FASCINATING if AI coding agents are the force that brings it back.

But Docker is free (unless you're a fairly large business, in which case containerd is still free, and you can either pay for the front-end license or figure out how to set up one of the free alternatives), and from what perspective are the isolations available for the containerd process inferior to those available for your browser process? The former was at least designed from the ground up with security, auditing, quotas etc. in mind, and offers better per-container granular control than your browser offers per-tab.

> The thing I most want to use this (or some other WASM Linux engine) for is running a coding agent against a virtual operating system directly in my browser.

Well, there it is, the dumbest thing I'll read on the internet all week.

Most of the engineering in Linux revolves around efficiently managing hardware interfaces to build up higher-level primitives, upon which your browser builds even higher-level primitives, that you want to use to simulate an x86 and attached devices, so you can start the process again? Somewhere (everywhere), hardware engineers are weeping. I'll bet you can't name a single advantage such a system would have over cloud hosting or a local Docker instance.

Even worse, you want this so your cloud-hosted imaginary friend can boil a medium-sized pond while taking the joyful bits of software development away from you, all for the enrichment of some of the most ethically-challenged members of the human race, and the fawning investors who keep tossing other people's capital at them? Our species has perhaps jumped the shark.