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agent-substrate
substrate
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agent-substrate / substrate
substrate
Agent Substrate: the core system
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Agent Substrate: the core system
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 AM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by week9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2026-05-23 03:42:20 UTC to 2026-10-12 19:17:47 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 18 | 2026-05-18 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-25 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| May 25 | 2026-05-25 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 1 | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 8 | 2026-06-08 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 15 | 2026-06-15 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 22 | 2026-06-22 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 29 | 2026-06-29 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 6 | 2026-07-06 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 13 | 2026-07-13 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 20 | 2026-07-20 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 27 | 2026-07-27 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 3 | 2026-08-03 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Aug 10 | 2026-08-10 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-17 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 17 | 2026-08-17 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-24 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 24 | 2026-08-24 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-08-31 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 31 | 2026-08-31 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-07 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 7 | 2026-09-07 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-14 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 14 | 2026-09-14 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-21 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 21 | 2026-09-21 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-09-28 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| Sep 28 | 2026-09-28 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-10-05 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 5 | 2026-10-05 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-10-12 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 12 | 2026-10-12 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-10-19 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesVIvishnukool·Oct 12, 2026
Agent Substrate from google if you wanna go hardcore, although it adds quite a bit of complexity and management that you probably don't want if it's just a personal setup - https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
Docker with tailnet is probably good enough for your usecase.
In Launch HN: Agent37 (YC F26) – Low-cost agent sandboxes for running agentsThat's not quite right. A recurring trend in ML is figuring out how to get an elastic interface for the the particular quirks of ML workloads (source: I worked on an open source one years ago for inference). Recently, there's been a lot of interest in doing this for agent workloads. Google recently released something called ax that is similar in spirit. The core of it is this: https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
At a high level, agent sandboxes have peculiar needs. Agents are really bursty, but also long lived. You need low latency suspend/resume calls. Checkpointing and recovery have some particular considerations. And naive approaches are often really wasteful, but over optimizing without harming durability, isolation, or consistency in performance can get tricky.
This is the new hot infra topic for agent swarms, for the time b
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eing. Whether that's impressive or not is up to the reader I guess, but it's a pretty involved project nonetheless.
Not sure what the platforms are using, but this was recently released: https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
In Show HN: Drop – A rootless Linux sandbox with gVisor supportAgent execution runtime engineered to run millions of sandboxes
2 points · Open discussionit's built on top of https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate which is not on Google github.
In AX – Google’s Open Agentic OrchestratorThe project that ax builds on top of does have that disclaimer, and sits on a non-google organisation https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
In AX – Google’s Open Agentic OrchestratorSo the agent-substrate checks a _ton_ of boxes. Almost all of the things it offers should be table stakes for everywhere we run not only agents but most software.
https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate
(For context I built something very similar to this the past 2 weeks for my homelab, trying to solve many of these problems. This comment is an edited version of an unreleased blog post I wrote last week.)
- Run code in secure microVMs or gVisor. Docker is not good enough. Qemu is not good enough. A secure environment for running untrusted code is the bare minimum. I don't see Firecracker in the repo yet, but that's ok the idea is there.
- Fast resumption. In my homelab, time-to-first-message is around 11-12 seconds. That's half setting up the pod, and half resuming the CLI (e.g. `codex resume ..`). Why resuming? In my homelab agents
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are commonly blocked waiting for CI or waiting for me to approve an action, in this case I stop their container to keep resource usage low. Then for resumption, you definitely don't want to waste the agents time by giving a new ephemeral disk and forcing them to re-clone and re-build. For microVMs this is not actually straightforward, for example Firecracker only allows block devices, so re-attaching an agents disk workspace requires a custom storage interface
- Zero Trust. Codex CLI permissions for example are extremely broken. "Can I run this 500 line long command? or allow any command starting with first 100 chars always?" More reasonable grants are needed.
I don't understand yet how they will surface Zero Trust notifications. In my homelab it's a Forgejo comment linking to an auth service, and a ntfy.sh iOS notification which opens up the auth service.
I don't get why they to restore the RAM of the agent env. Maybe to fully optimize resumption. Idk, I don't have that much RAM in my homelab, my agents use a ton, testing stuff in Chromium making screenshots for me. I can't keep RAM for 100 workspaces from the past 24 hours in RAM.
MITM gateway is very cool.
I'm curious how they will integrate with microVMs. I just wrote yesterday[1] about how there are NO GOOD OPTIONS for this atm. Kata is decent but the attack surface it introduces makes me uncomfortable.
[1]: https://srcreigh.ca/posts/auditable-kata/
But anyway, even if this project is abandoned out of the gate by Google, we should be happy, it sets the bar where it should be. I'm excited to learn how they solved these problems differently than I did.
Agent Substrate: The Core System
2 points · Open discussion