A terminal sandbox for AI agents: terminal-mac for macOS
The open-source terminal-mac utility lets AI agents run a virtual macOS directly from the CLI, keeping them isolated from your main machine.
If you are not using proactive bots yet, at least give your terminal AI agent its own sandbox.
For macOS, there is an open-source utility, terminal-mac, that launches a real virtual macOS directly in the CLI.
- The agent creates a clean VM.
- It interacts with it through
MCPand skills. - It keeps separate logins, projects, and state.
- It does not distract you on the main machine.
You need a Mac with an M-series processor and a CLI with graphics support, such as cmux.
You can also install cua-driver, one of the best computer-use tools now, so the agent can click the interface immediately instead of spending tokens calculating coordinates from screenshots.
cua can also run macOS VMs through Lume, but not directly in the CLI.
For Windows, no comparable CLI solution is known yet.
Why it matters
AnalysisIsolated sandboxes make AI agents safer and more practical by preventing them from touching the user's real environment. This pattern is especially useful for computer-use workflows that need GUI access without wasting tokens on visual coordinate inference.
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