Launch HN: OneCLI (YC S26) – OSS sandboxed agent harness for teams

8/21/2026 at 9:35:13 AM

Sandbox choice matters more than most agent harnesses admit. Docker-in-Docker vs firecracker vs unshared namespaces each break in different ways once you start bind-mounting the user's repo. Curious which tradeoff you picked and why.

by hugorus87

8/19/2026 at 7:36:55 PM

Keeping the real credential out of model context is a meaningful improvement, but the gateway still becomes a confused-deputy boundary. How granular are policies below the endpoint level? An agent allowed to call a CRM API may still be tricked into exporting the wrong customer or changing a field it should only read. I'd be interested in whether policies can constrain method, path, request fields, resource ownership, and response volume, and how those rules are tested against prompt injection.

by ezzy-1630

8/19/2026 at 5:19:17 PM

How do you even win in this space? I feel like every day I see either a paid or fully OSS version of this product being posted here. As an end user I've become so overwhelmed that I've just started to mostly ignore them at this point. I can't be the only potential customer feeling this way?

by aliasxneo

8/19/2026 at 6:21:33 PM

Honestly, we're not sure yet how we win this space. We both come from security backgrounds, and that's probably what led us to where we are today. basically we built the gateway first because we were afraid of using openclaw the way it came out of the box. we didn't even connect our gmail out of fear. then after a while working with agents behind the gateway, we just started building our own agent that integrates better with it, for me and my partner. So maybe it lands with the same kind of people as us, who worry about the security side and want that safe feeling. Still figuring out how many of us are out there.

by guyb3

8/20/2026 at 5:45:08 AM

This I fully agree. I think I was few who never wanted to try Open Claw or wanted to connect my accounts because I saw someone at Meta getting their emails deleted.

Then after I listened to Garry’s talk on Gbrain last week I thought why not give it a try.

So connected my email and calendar to a simple agent I built via MCP and I get a summery of important emails and also delete all non important ones.

Still a WIP: https://github.com/rukshn/zen

But I agree the space is very much crowded

by rukshn

8/19/2026 at 5:25:09 PM

You're not alone, I don't get it either and this market is extremely crowded with many agent tools popping up everyday.

Some closed source, lots that are open source, hundreds of thousands and many which are completely vibecoded.

I feel that YC just invests in anything these days.

I mean, I don't see a moat here.

Like, why this over Grok Bot or anything that Anthropic or OpenAI would make for their 900M+ users?

Or is that the goal all along? Get acquired by a lab?

by colesantiago

8/19/2026 at 5:31:36 PM

> I feel that YC just invests in anything these days.

When there is a popular gold rush, YC invests in many companies that do the same thing with the expectation that 1) a rising tide lifts all ships, and 2) if there is a clear winner, they have eggs in every basket.

by nrmitchi

8/19/2026 at 6:35:44 PM

It’s definitely a crowded space, totally agree about it. honestly for us we didn't want to commit to a specific provider, whether that's grok or openai. So we decided to go with a harness that lets us switch models easily when one is down, or when another provider comes out with a new improved model

by guyb3

8/19/2026 at 6:37:36 PM

Yep. OrcaBot has all these features. Free on desktop.

It's been out for 6 months.

by robbomacrae

8/21/2026 at 6:01:09 AM

If every agent action maps to a real user, with clear limits and logs, agents become much easier to trust.

by madmecodes

8/19/2026 at 5:18:45 PM

The important detail is whether approval binds to the exact proposed action, including the recipient, repository, issue, or data being sent, rather than just “allow Gmail” or “allow this endpoint.” How granular are the gateway policies for APIs where read and write actions share the same host?

by taoh

8/19/2026 at 5:53:05 PM

jonathan from OneCLI here, yes - approval binds to the exact req by opening it (method, URL, body) when there’s a matching policy defined. then the gateway holds the call and the card shows the parsed payload.

just to clarify how it works - on same host, rules match based on method + path + body, not only the host. for example, GET /calendar/v3/* can be allowed while POST needs approval.

by Jonathanfishner

8/19/2026 at 7:44:31 PM

In a similar vein, I've been playing with Nemesis8. It provides the same sandbox and network constraint as this repo but adds orchestration and observability. You can control and communicate a fleet of agent containers that persist sessions, configure MCP tooling, and schedule events. That appears to just be the surface, I'm still digging into it. Now that I've experienced this single-pane-of-glass interface, I don't think I'm going back. If this is a trend, I hope it sticks. Check it out: https://github.com/DeepBlueDynamics/nemesis8

by GiganticCupcake

8/20/2026 at 6:15:36 AM

Looks good , but I don't understand the licensing. The bottom of the read me says it's Apache 2.0, except for the /ee folder, but I don't see the /ee folder in the repo, at least not at the top-level. I also don't see anything about what the enterprise features are on the actual web page.

by snthpy

8/20/2026 at 6:40:09 AM

Are you aware of https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/agent-prox... ?

by sagarpatil

8/19/2026 at 6:06:15 PM

I think it's pretty interesting - I can see why companies would want to go for this instead of build everything themselves...

Curious about how your customers are responding to pricing. 20 agents for $499/month without API costs included feels steep... but perhaps within the range of "worth it if we don't have to think about this".

by FailMore

8/20/2026 at 3:06:16 AM

How do credentials work to access user data with the right permissions? Is there a way to integrate OAuth flows via Slack, for instance?

by grugnog

8/19/2026 at 8:52:07 PM

Honest question, how does this project already has over 3,200 stars on GitHub?

Their video demo was posted 13 hours ago, and it only has 38 views as of the time of this post.

The post on HN is 4 hours ago.

by brunoborges

8/20/2026 at 4:17:45 PM

I’ve known them for months, the product was available for at least that much time. I guess this is just a funding announcement, not a launch from nothing.

by brabel

8/20/2026 at 11:50:17 AM

I started using OneCLI when Nanoclaw (came out just after Open Claw) announced them as the way to handle credentials. I think that may have been their first boost?

by pitzips

8/19/2026 at 10:11:59 PM

I had the project already starred, I lurk around the sandbox space from time to time, and the project it's a few months old and was already discoverable and in a usable state before today.

by frangonf

8/20/2026 at 12:58:23 AM

Still, over 3,000 stars so quick? It's just weird.

by brunoborges

8/20/2026 at 11:29:17 AM

The earliest repository commits and initial public announcements show this date: March 17, 2026.

by soltanov

8/20/2026 at 12:41:51 AM

How is OneCLI different from Databrick's Omnigent?

by Cameri

8/19/2026 at 6:51:42 PM

Interesting, gonna take a closer look at this. But nice repo!

by eli_berman

8/20/2026 at 5:03:30 AM

How does this compare to YC's qm?

by Axsuul

8/20/2026 at 5:27:02 AM

fair question and there are lots of overlap, here some diffs we found important for us - 1) the agent never holds your keys and all its traffic goes to onecli gateway. which adds the secret at the moment of the request. 2) our approval mechanism for risky actions like sending an email or deleting data need human approval. 3) each agent gets its own Slack app with a name, and its own avatar. QM uses one shared workspace bot for everyone, in onecli it will be three agents that look like three people in Slack, not one bot.

by guyb3

8/20/2026 at 3:53:21 AM

[dead]

by shidesheng