I'm Jan, a software engineer, founder, and open-source enthusiast working on Drop - a new sandboxing tool for Linux with a focus on productivity.

The need for a tool like Drop had been with me for a long time. I felt uneasy installing and running out-of-distro programs that often brought in huge dependency trees without any isolation. On the other hand I dreaded the naked root@b0fecb:/# Docker shell. The main thing that makes Docker great for deploying software - a reproducible, minimal environment - gets in the way of productive development work - tools are missing from a container; config files and environment variables, are all unavailable.

The last straw that made me start building Drop was LLM agents. To work well: be able to compile code, run tests, analyze git logs, agents need access to tools installed on a machine. But giving agents unrestricted access is so clearly risky, that almost every HN discussion on agentic workflows includes a rant about a lack of sandboxing.

I've been working on Drop for quite some time, using it daily since the earliest prototype, iterating on the UX, identifying and fixing pain points. From the very start, UX was and will continue to be the main focus of the project. There are several mature sandboxing solutions for Linux, yet sandboxing is not widely used for everyday development work. My bet is that frictionless UX can change this.

Drop is carefully engineered. The initial version is ready for daily use, with good unit and integration test coverage. While agents are great coding assistants, I strongly believe that a security tool like this cannot be vibe-coded. All the design decisions, every UX detail, the flexible yet high-level config structure, the command-line interface were made by and will continue to be made by a human.

My goal is for sponsorship to support at least one full-time developer on Drop. Long-term, this is needed for the project to stay healthy. If you like Drop and would like to see it succeed, consider sponsoring the project. If your company sells AI tools, your sponsorship will support a more secure ecosystem for your users, where agents can be run with less risk.

Check the project's planned enhancements to learn what will be added with your help.