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BB Box

BB Box user guide

BB Box gives each BB thread computers of its own, called boxes. A box can run Linux, macOS or Windows, as a server you reach through a terminal or as a desktop you can see and use. This guide is for people who use boxes day to day.

A box belongs to a thread. It stays until you release it, or until its thread is archived or deleted. A machine is a box of your own that belongs to no thread and stays until you remove it.

Using boxes

  • The Box panel and the Boxes page: see a thread’s boxes and every box you have, and act on them
  • Making a box: choose its system, type, image, size and where it runs
  • Resizing a box: give a box more or fewer cores, more or less memory, or a larger disk
  • GPU boxes: give a Linux box an NVIDIA card, shared or whole, for compute, training and desktops drawn on the GPU
  • Snapshots: save a box’s state, restore it with an undo, fork it into a new box, and keep it past the box’s release
  • Desktops: watch a desktop, take control, copy and paste, hand back, and show it as video
  • Device boxes: iPhones and iPads in the iOS Simulator, and Android phones and tablets in the emulator, to test apps on
  • Recordings: clips of an agent’s work on a desktop, with each step and its result captioned
  • The terminal: use a shell in a box
  • A box’s files: read and change the box user’s own files
  • Images: project images, and how standard images stay up to date
  • Long commands and jobs: what happens when an agent’s command runs for minutes
  • Files: copy files to and from a box, and put files in every box
  • Spare boxes: boxes made ahead, so a thread has one at once
  • Sound and the microphone on Mac boxes: feed speech to an app, and what agents’ apps may use
  • The Monitor: see how BB’s server, your machines and boxes are doing, open a box’s views and threads, and get told when BB’s server is under pressure
  • Settings: set up backends, choose the kinds and sizes on offer, and the general settings
  • A cloud server as a Docker host: rent a server, such as one on Hetzner Cloud, and make Docker boxes there
  • Linux boxes on Hetzner Cloud: Docker hosts BB Box makes in Hetzner Cloud as boxes need them, and deletes once idle
  • Mac and Linux boxes on Namespace: rent a Mac or a Linux machine for each box by the minute
  • Linux boxes on boat.dev: rent a Linux VM for each box by the second
  • Joining cloud machines to your tailnet: let the machines BB Box rents reach a BB server on a Tailscale tailnet

Reference

Agents use boxes through tools, and you can use them from the command line:

MIT licenceThird-party software