AI Shoulder Surf V2

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Back on April 1, 2026 we had our second AI Shoulder Surf. I wrote up the first of these sessions last time around. It’s basically an informal Zoom call where we share screens, talk about what we’re working on, and admit what we don’t know. No video recording, to keep the stress and performative aspect of video calls out of it, and to leave space for asking questions without posturing. Admitting to knowledge gaps is not a problem for me personally, because knowledge gaps are basically all I have, but I want other people to have a safe space too.

What follows is again a combination of a factual AI summary and my own commentary. I had an assist but it’s not slop. The target audience is mostly the folks who were on the call, but I’ll be happy if anyone else gets something out of it.

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" Cardiff Kook, December 8 2013 " by Tim Buss is licensed under CC BY 2.0.# Daniel: Incus/LXD Coding Sandbox

First off Daniel demoed coding-sandbox, which he had been building for several weeks around anIncus / LXD sandbox. He landed on LXD over QEMU/KVM and VirtualBox because the CLI is faster, mounting directories is more Docker-like, and the whole setup leans well into the ephemeral-container model.

There are two execution modes:

Ephemeral container (the default): built from scratch on top of Debian and Bash, with a unique directory per session. Cheap to spin up, cheap to throw away.

VM: persistent storage, but expect roughly ten minutes the first time to build images and install tooling.

To avoid hitting the public internet every rebuild, Daniel runs an APT cache on his local network. The package of interest isapt-cacher-ng — multiple machines on the LAN pull from a central cache, which is handy both for testing new images without re-downloading the world and for keeping packages in sync across machines.

He demoed two variants: a standard coding sandbox and a “quick” coding sandbox on top of an Ubuntu image w…