In the context of AI coding agents, sandboxing refers to running agent code in an isolated execution environment that cannot affect live systems or other agent runs. A sandboxed agent has its own filesystem, process space, and network boundaries.
Sandboxing is essential for production use of coding agents. Without isolation, an agent that makes a mistake can corrupt the codebase, interfere with other running agents, or accidentally modify production data. Sandboxed environments also enable parallel agent execution, where multiple agents work on different tasks simultaneously without collision.
Codegen and Devin both run agents in sandboxed environments. Most IDE-based tools like Cursor and Copilot do not sandbox their agent execution since they operate directly in the developer’s local environment.