GitHub's Agent Sandbox Went GA and Finally Made 'Let It Run' Safe
Sandboxed agents that can't touch your machine change the calculus for letting them work unsupervised.
GitHub flipped Copilot's sandboxing to general availability in mid-October. The agent can now run, install, and test code inside an isolated environment instead of on your laptop with your keys.
This is the feature that makes 'set it going and check back' actually sane. Before, an autonomous coding agent had your file system and your credentials; one bad instruction and it was deleting things.
I still wouldn't give it a blank check. The sandbox limits blast radius, not judgment. I review the diff the same way I'd review a junior dev's pull request.
But the difference is real: the worst case went from 'it touched production' to 'it touched a container it couldn't escape.' That's the bar agent tooling should have hit a year ago.