I’ve been trying a slightly different setup for working with Codex, give it a VM, connect to it remotely, and let it get on with setting up a development environment and making changes. Mainly so that I could trial this sort of more remote development from less powerful devices than my main daily driver, maybe even my phone! I did a bunch of research, and the easiest service to get off the ground with seemed to be boxd.sh.
One of the reasons for experimenting is disk space. The cloud environments that you can use with Codex / ChatGPT have had around 20 or 30 GB available, which can get rather tight for larger setups involving multiple projects, or even single repos that have lots of dependencies, and or need various docker images for various things.. most of my experiences with the cloud workspaces as part of chatGPT / codex have actually been rather disappointing! A few repositories, dependencies, container images and development databases later, and suddenly you are thinking about disk space rather than the thing you wanted to work on.
The boxd machines come with 100 GB of disk by default. That seemed like a much more useful starting point, and I wanted to see how little effort it would take to get one working with Codex and Wikimedia GitLab for a small feature for a-wikimedia-cli.
An account, some integrations, and a GitLab bot
I had already made an account at app.boxd.sh, which currently comes with $30 of free credit (and an offer for more free credit on your first top up). I have actually be using the VM on and off for a few weeks now, and only spent 10USD. The simplicity of the interfaces for turning them on and off, and the startup time really help in not wasting resources. For a 2 CPU and 4GB machine, not bad. And equivalent digital ocean droplet would be 24 USD per month, but it wouldn’t come with quick such a simple interface(but i’m up for trying that soon too).
