122 points by tosh 4 days ago | 69 comments on HN
| Mild positive Product · v3.7· 2026-02-28 12:09:19 0
Summary Digital Access & Technological Participation Acknowledges
This GitHub repository page hosts technical documentation for just-bash, a TypeScript sandboxed bash environment library. The content itself is purely technical and does not engage with human rights issues. However, structural factors—open-source publication under Apache-2.0 license, free public access, transparent source code, and community collaboration mechanisms—embody principles aligned with information freedom, educational access, and technological participation. The evaluation identifies mild positive signals across Articles 19, 21, 26, and 27, while recognizing that the product documentation remains fundamentally neutral on human rights questions.
At this point why not make the agents use a restricted subset of python, typescript or lua or something.
Bash has been unchanged for decades but its not a very nice language.
I know pydantic has been experimenting with https://github.com/pydantic/monty (restricted python) and I think Cloudflare and co were experimenting with giving typescript to agents.
We just released a driver that allows users of just-bash to attach a full Archil file system, synced to S3. This would let you run just-bash in an enrivonment where you don't have a full VM and get high-performance access to data that's in your S3 bucket already to do like greps or edits.
I have been playing around with something like this.
I'm not going for compatibility, but something that is a bit hackable. Deliberately not having /lib /share and /etc to avoid confusion that it might be posix
This ends up reading files into node.js and then running a command like grep but implemented in JS. I love the concept but isn’t this incredibly slow compared to native cli tools? Building everything in JS on top of just readFile and writeFile interfaces seems pretty limited in what you can do for performance.
Interesting concept but I think the issue is to make the tools compatible with the official tools otherwise you will get odd behaviour. I think it is useful for very specific scenarios where you want to control the environment with a subset of tools only while benefiting from some form of scripts.
Why couldn’t they name it `agent-bash` then? What’s with all the “just-this”, “super-that” naming?
Like developer lost the last remaining brain cells developing it, and when it’s came to name it, used the first meaningless word that came up.
After all you’re limiting discovery with name like that.
The unix commandline tools being the most efficient way to use an LLM has been a surprise.
I wonder the reason.
Maybe 'do one thing well'? The piping? The fact that the tools have been around so long so there are so many examples in the training data? Simplicity? All of it?
The success of this project depends on the answer.
Even so, I suspect that something like this will be a far too leaky abstraction.
But Vercel must try because they see the writing on the wall.
Trying to secure the sandbox the harness is running in seems like the hard way to do things. It's not a bad idea, but I think it'd be easier to focus on isolating the sandbox and securing resources the harness sandbox accesses, since true security requires that anyhow.
It’s cool to see this project and others pop up. Virtualizing os primitives like bash and even file systems
You can interface around the nodejs files system interface and have access to some nice tools, like git isomorphic for instance. Then obviously everything couples nicely with agents.
Agents really do not care at all how "nice" a language is. You only need to be picky with language if a human is going to be working with the code. I get the impression that is not the use case here though
Incompatibilities don't matter much provided your error messages are actionable - an LLM can hit a problem, read the error message and try again. They'll also remember that solution for the rest of that session.
This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if something like Luau would be a good solution here - it's a typed version of Lua meant for sandboxing (built for Roblox scripting) that has a lot of guardrails on it.
I did a slightly less ambitious prototype a few weeks ago where I created added lazy loading of GCS files into the just-bash file-systems, as well as lots of other on-demand files. Was a lot of fun.
I would not over-read into that doc. In practice, the only missing stuff are extreme edge cases of the type that is actually not consistent between other implementations of bash.
In practice it works great. I haven't seen a failed command in a while
I'll add that agents (CC/Codex) very often screw up escaping/quoting with their bash scripts and waste tokens figuring out what happened. It's worse when it's a script they save and re use because it's often a code injection vulnerability.
If you want a better guess: It's because of the man pages for all the tools are likely duplicated across so many media for the LLM training that there's just an efficient pipeline. They go back to the 70s or whatever.
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