Show HN: Machine – One VM per Project
A developer created a CLI tool called machine to improve security by running coding projects in isolated Lima VMs. The tool uses declarative profiles to define development environments and supports secure handling of SSH keys and secrets. It allows teams to share and replicate development setups easily while keeping sensitive data on the host machine.
- ▪The machine CLI starts a Lima VM for each project to enhance security.
- ▪It uses declarative profiles to configure VMs with tools like Node.js, Docker, and git.
- ▪SSH signatures can be forwarded from the host using MacOS Keychain or 1Password.
- ▪Environment variables and secrets are injected at startup and never stored in the VM.
- ▪Teams can share a projects.toml file to standardize development environments.
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166119 |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 04:49:37 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T05:03:58.483Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T05:03:58.483Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | qxMGYgaekh7l |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Hi all!I realized it’s really not secure to run coding projects directly on my Mac. All the NPM hacks recently, especially with agentic coding — you’re always one npm install away from a disaster.So I’ve built a small CLI called machine that starts a Lima VM for each of your projects. It supports declarative “profiles” which are like package.json for your VM. The default profile comes with standard stuff like Node.js, git, Docker, Claude Code and Codex.If you share your projects.toml with your team, every developer can spin up your team’s entire dev environment with one command. No need to install dev tools, clone repos, npm install anything manually.Another cool thing is that you can use the native MacOS keychain or 1password to forward SSH signatures to the VM.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.