Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs

2/13/2026 at 11:58:03 PM

Thanks for sharing this interesting project and approach!

One suggestion for improvement: Add some more info to your website/GitHub about the need for a provider and which providers are compatible. It took me a bit to figure that out because there was no prominent info about it. Additionally, none of the demos showed a login or authentication part. To me, it seemed like the VMs just came out of nowhere. So at first, I thought "Cloudrouter" was a project/company that gave away free VMs/GPUs (e.g. free tier/trial thing). But that seemed too good to be true. Later, I noticed the e2b.app domain and then I also found the little note way down at the bottom of the site that says "Provider selection" and "Use E2B provider (default)". Then I got it. However, I should mention that I don't know much about this whole topic. I hadn't heard of E2B or Modal before. Other people might find it more clear.

For those that are wondering about this too, you will need to use a provider like https://e2b.dev/ or https://modal.com/ to use this skill, and you pay them based on usage time.

by hxseven

2/14/2026 at 12:05:13 AM

Right now, all usage is routed through us, hence `cloudrouter login` is required for now. Plan on adding bring-your-own cloud/key, but having something that's fast to setup is hard since we need to pre-build a template that includes VNC, browser, VSCode, worker daemon, etc...

by lawrencechen

2/14/2026 at 12:22:39 AM

Thanks for the feedback! Adding the info into the website now.

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 9:13:05 PM

Ah, just one step closer to a model with it's own weights file can bootstrap and run itself.

by pixl97

2/14/2026 at 12:52:12 AM

I think railway deserves a mention here: https://docs.railway.com/ai/mcp-server

by kovek

2/14/2026 at 1:11:23 AM

Railway is awesome! Pretty different use cases though - Railway's MCP is for deploying and managing persistent services (git-push-to-deploy). CloudRouter is about ephemeral sandboxes: the agent spins up a throwaway VM, does its work, and tears it down.

We are definitely inspired by Railway though!

by lawrencechen

2/13/2026 at 11:32:18 PM

Myself I already pre-provisioned a kubernetes cluster and it just makes new manifests and deploys there. Less dangerous, less things for it to fail at. The networking is already setup. The costs are known/fixed (unless you autoscale in the cloud). It's much faster to deploy.

by killingtime74

2/14/2026 at 12:10:20 AM

Fair enough, is this mainly for running services or do you use it for dev loop too?

by lawrencechen

2/14/2026 at 12:57:57 AM

both. local k8s (Rancher desktop) for devloop integration tests, remote k8s for running services. Helm chart to bootstrap cluster services like CRDs and Cloudflare tunnel.

by killingtime74

2/14/2026 at 12:26:28 AM

How are you guardrailing it? The first thing I thought of was how cryptominer bots love to spin up lots of gpu-enabled vms (malware). Are there any cost or resource hard-restrictions?

by notepad0x90

2/14/2026 at 1:21:50 AM

We have concurrency limits for sandboxes and some of the larger GPUs have guardrails put into place. Contact us when you get to those limits!

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 7:56:39 PM

This is cool! I tried it out, running outside my agent with `cloudrouter start .` and got a password request to auth into the server. Opened an issue[1].

[1] https://github.com/manaflow-ai/manaflow/issues/1711

by nbbaier

2/13/2026 at 8:08:15 PM

Hey Nick! I figured out the root cause and have pushed a fix. Could you update the package and try again?

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 11:43:07 PM

Anyone use fly.io sprites for this yet?

by truelson

2/13/2026 at 11:59:55 PM

Plan on wrapping other sandbox providers besides e2b, modal... hence the name cloudrouter!

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 8:01:19 PM

What stops just mentioning AWS/Azure/GCP CLI tools to agents?

by lostmsu

2/13/2026 at 8:15:37 PM

Totally fair point. For me it was just a nice primitive to have -- just one command gives the agent a VM with SSH, file sync, browser, GPU ready to go. Instead of dealing with cloud account setup, security groups, SSH keys, and other shenanigans. For cloudrouter, the dependencies/Docker/VNC/Juypter Lab come pre-baked so you don't need to think about configuring VM environment setups...

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 8:49:07 PM

You can but I have to say that there's value in a tool that lets the ai do it using less tokens.

by simlevesque

2/13/2026 at 8:12:57 PM

Nothing

by fassssst

2/13/2026 at 9:18:32 PM

It's a cool idea, but personally I don't like the implementation. I usually don't use monolithic tools that cram a lot of different solutions into one thing. For one thing, especially if they're compiled, it's very hard to just modify them to do one extra thing I need without getting into a long development cycle. For two, they are usually inflexible, restricting what I can do. Third, they often aren't very composeable. Fourth, often they aren't easily pluggable/extensible.

I much prefer independent, loosely coupled, highly cohesive, composeable, extensible tools. It's not a very "programmery" solution, but it makes it easier as a user to fix things, extend things, combine things, etc.

The Docker template you have bundles a ton of apps into one container. This is problematic as it creates a big support burden, build burden, and compatibility burden. Docker works better when you make individual containers of a single app, and run them separately, and connect them with tcp, sockets, or volumes. Then the user can swap them out, add new ones, remove unneded ones, etc, and they can use an official upstream project. Docker-in-docker with a custom docker network works pretty well, and the host is still accessible if needed.

As a nit-pick: your auth code has browser-handling logic. This is low cohesion, a sign of problems to come. And in your rsync code:

   sshCmd := fmt.Sprintf("ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ProxyCommand=%q", proxyCmd)

I was just commenting the other day on here about how nobody checks SSH host keys and how SSH is basically wide-open due to this. Just leaving this here to show people what I mean. (It's not an easy problem to solve, but ignoring security isn't great either)

by 0xbadcafebee

2/13/2026 at 10:26:28 PM

Re: monolithic tools. I think having template overrides for the user could solve this issue -- although it is a bit tougher to implement. I wanted a monolithic tool because it optimizes for faster startup times and just works but it does sacrifice configurability for the user.

Re: Docker template. I understand the Docker critique. So, the primary use case is an agent uploading its working directory and spinning it up as a dev environment. The agent needs the project files, the dev server, and the browser all in one place. If these are separate containers, the agent has to reason about volume mounts, Docker networking, etc — potentially more confusion, higher likelihood that agents get something wrong. A single environment where cloudrouter start ./my-project just works is what I envisioned.

Re: SSH host keys. SSH never connects to a real host. It's tunneled through TLS WebSocket via ProxyCommand. Also the hostname is fake, we have per-session auth token on the WebSocket layer, and VMs are ephemeral with fresh keys every boot. So, SSH isn't wide-open. We don't expose the SSH port (port 10000); everything goes through our authenticated proxy.

by austinwang115

2/13/2026 at 9:26:15 PM

Nice, we build something similar at dstack

We recently also added support for agents: https://skills.sh/dstackai/dstack/dstack

Our approach though is more tide-case agnostic and in the direction of brining full-fledged container orchestration converting from development to training and inference

by cheptsov

2/13/2026 at 10:19:26 PM

Great demo!

by estellezhangai

2/13/2026 at 9:39:02 PM

Freaking wow.

by robbru

2/13/2026 at 7:55:14 PM

Awesome demo!!!

by wpan25

2/13/2026 at 7:42:30 PM

Thanks for such an enjoyable read!

by nickhe2003

2/13/2026 at 10:15:09 PM

[dead]

by huflungdung