By Sumeet Vaidya
At WeAreDevelopers last week, Docker made the case that containers were never built for the kind of isolation AI agents need. We agree. But a clean sandbox is only the starting point.
An agent sealed away in an empty box can't do much real work. To ship to production, agents need what your engineers need: access to your databases, internal APIs, staging dependencies, and the rest of the services your product runs on. For most enterprises, none of that ever leaves their cloud.
We built Crafting to close that gap. Our platform gives agents and engineers secure, networked sandboxes that run in your cloud and are wired into the services your team already depends on. Real data. Real services. Your cloud.
Starting today, the same platform our enterprise customers run in their cloud also runs on your laptop. Crafting Express is generally available, and anyone can install it and try Crafting for themselves.
Until now, seeing Crafting in action usually meant a conversation with our team, a security review, and a deployment into your cloud account. That process exists for good reasons, and it is still how teams roll Crafting out at scale. But it made the first look harder than it should be.
Express removes that barrier. There is no sales call, no cloud account to provision, and no commitment. Install one CLI tool, run one command, and within minutes you have a working Crafting environment on your own machine.
Express is not a stripped-down demo. It's a special edition of Crafting optimized for local use, running in a container with support for core features. Sandboxes, workspaces, and agents all working together.
Kubernetes traffic interception is the feature our enterprise customers lean on most. It lets a workspace take over traffic for a single service while every other service in the cluster keeps running as usual. The interception happens at the network level, so there are no shadow services, no changed deployments, and no edits to your Kubernetes resources.
In production, that is how one shared staging cluster serves thousands of engineers and agents in parallel. With Express, you can see it work end to end on your laptop: swap in a modified service, send real requests through the local cluster, and watch your change behave alongside everything else.
Bring your own model API key, point agents at a repository, and watch pre-built agents work together: one plans, one builds, one validates. Each agent runs in its own secure sandbox with different permissions and access to dependent systems as needed.
Our open source agent hub comes with a starter set of agents across technical, technical-adjacent, and non-technical work, from engineering agents to a product manager and a legal contract reviewer. Bring your MCP servers and your existing agents or build your own agent teams in minutes without a single line of code. The full Crafting UI is still one click away when you want to dig into sandboxes and workspaces directly.
Setup takes about 10 to 15 minutes, most of which is Express building your local cluster in the background.
First, install the Crafting CLI:
curl -sSL https://sandboxes.cloud/sh/install-cli | bash
You can also download the CLI directly.
Then launch Crafting Express with a single command:
cs express start
The CLI walks you through the rest: signing up and logging in, creating Docker volumes for persisted state and data, starting the Docker container that runs Express, and showing you how to reach it from the web UI and the CLI.
Once it is running, add a model API key, connect a repository, and start your first agents. For more detail, see the Crafting documentation and the Express repository.
We built Express so anyone can try Crafting. Along the way, it also became a great place to run your own agents.
Standing up a personal agent setup usually means a pile of logistics. You provision sandboxes, wire up a cluster, keep agents from stepping on each other, and figure out how they reach the services they need. Express handles all of that in one install. You get isolated sandboxes, a working Kubernetes cluster, multi-agent orchestration, and MCP integrations out of the box, so you can spend your time on the agents themselves.
And when your agent factory outgrows your laptop, the path forward is already there. The same agents can run on Crafting in your company's cloud, keep working after you close your laptop, share resources across a team, and reach the real internal services and data that stay inside your environment.
Crafting Express is available now at github.com/crafting-dev/express. Install the CLI and see what your agents can do when they test against real infrastructure in minutes.
If you build a personal agent factory with Express, we want to see it. Tell us what you build, what breaks, and what you want next. And if you want to bring the same setup to your team, with real data and real services in your own cloud, reach out to us.
