Creator here. A few key differences:

1. from isolation pov, Matchlock launch Firecracker microvm with its own kernel, so you get hardware-level isolation rather than bubblewrap's seccomp/namespace approach, therefore a sandbox escape would require a VM breakout.

2. Matchlock intercepts and controls all network traffic by default, with deny-all networking and domain allowlisting. Bubblewrap doesn't provide this, which is how exfiltration attacks like the one recently demonstrated against Claude co-work (https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/claude-cowork-exfiltra...).

3. You can use any Docker/OCI image and even build one, so the dev experience is seamless if you are using docker-container-ish dev workflow.

4. The sandboxes are programmable, as Matchlock exposes a JSON-RPC-based SDK (Go and Python) for launching and controlling VMs programmatically, which gives you finer-grained control for more complex use cases.

Creator of Matchlock here. Mostly for performance and usability. For interacting with external APIs like GCP or GitHub that generally have huge surface area, it's much more token-efficient and easier to set up if you just give the agent gcloud and gh CLI tools and the secrets to use them (in our case fake ones), compared to wiring up a full-blown MCP server. Plus, agents tend to perform better with CLI tools since they've been heavily RL'd on them.

Sometimes people are too lazy to write their own agent loop and decided to run off-the-shelf coding agent (e.g. Claude Code, or Pi in case of clawdbot) in environment.

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Exactly.