{"id":108327,"title":"machine0: Cloud computers for AI agents","tagline":"One command spins up a persistent VM. Your agent drives it via CLI or MCP, building its own fleet from 1 vCPU up to 60 vCPU / 240 GB and 8×H100s.","body":"TLDR: machine0 is a CLI for agent compute: “machine0 new mybox” gives your agent a full cloud VM, billed by the minute, from $0.013/hr up to 60 vCPU / 240 GB and 8×H100s. Agents drive it themselves via CLI or MCP.\n\n\u003chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyllkZ0M04E\u003e\n\n## The Pain\n\nAgent workloads are moving from ephemeral to always-on. A coding agent working on a hard feature runs 6-8 hours. Auto-research agents run for days. OpenClaw \u0026amp; Hermes run 24/7. As you run more in parallel:\n\n* **Resources**: a few agents on a big codebase saturate your RAM and CPU. Auto-research needs GPUs you don't have.\n* **Security**: “—yolo” on your personal machine is one prompt injection away from exfiltrated credentials.\n* **Availability**: close your laptop and the agent dies mid-task.\n* **Isolation**: there's no clean line between everything on your laptop and the minimum this agent actually needs.\n\n## The Solution\n\nmachine0 gives every agent its own computer. It's a CLI that both humans and agents can use without reading docs:\n\n* “machine0 new mybox” creates an SSH-ready VM with a static IP and HTTPS endpoint. Always on (99.99% uptime) until you switch it off.\n* **Billed by the minute.** 1 vCPU / 1 GB at $0.013/hr up to 60 vCPU / 240 GB, plus GPUs from RTX 4000 Ada to 8×H100s.\n* **Profiles.** Bundles of MCP connections, credentials, prompts, and env vars, injected at VM creation. Each agent gets exactly the capabilities (or personality) you choose, and nothing else.\n* **Agents self-serve.** Hand the CLI or MCP server to Claude, Codex, or OpenCode and it manages its own fleet: spin up a box for a build, snapshot it, tear it down.\n* **Suspend \u0026amp; resume.** Pause an idle machine, stop paying for compute, resume exactly where it left off.\n* **Snapshot \u0026amp; clone.** Configure one machine perfectly, then stamp out ten identical agents from it.\n* **NixOS is first-class.** Declarative, reproducible machines.\n\n## How people use it\n\n* **Compute for your agent**: give it the CLI and it spins up its own VMs for builds, tests, and long jobs instead of grinding your laptop.\n* **Hosting the agent itself**: run Claude, Codex or Hermes 24/7. Snapshot once, then clone as many as you want.\n* **Swarms of agents**: an orchestrator agent spawns worker machines, farms out subtasks, and tears them down when the work is done.\n* **Auto-Research on GPUs**: drop an agent on an H100 with a goal and let it run for days.\n\n## About me\n\nI'm a solo, second-time YC founder. I was CTO of Upflow (YC W20), where I scaled EPD post series A and personally owned DevOps, infra, and security for years because they were too high-stakes to delegate. Upflow handles sensitive accounting data for companies like Postman, ProductBoard, and Lattice, and is doing many millions in ARR.\n\nBefore that I built consumer payments at Hike Messenger (100M+ users) in India. Working with sensitive data and infra for years is what got me deep into the problems machine0 solves, security especially.\n\n## Asks 🙏\n\n* Try it: \u003chttps://machine0.io\u003e\n* Let's talk about your agent fleets, software factory or auto-research: [hello@machine0.io](mailto:hello@machine0.io)","slug":"SBD-machine0-cloud-computers-for-ai-agents","created_at":"2026-07-31T15:30:36.400Z","updated_at":"2026-09-19T05:09:25.856Z","total_vote_count":22,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/SBD-machine0-cloud-computers-for-ai-agents","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":32527,"name":"machine0","slug":"machine0","url":"https://machine0.io","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/0eb24a85015d2fd30115c143876496fed0a17210.png","batch":"Summer 2026","industry":"B2B","tags":["Developer Tools","Cloud Computing"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/32527"}}