Daytona vs Offscreen

Daytona

API keys with per-action scopes, so an agent can create sandboxes without being able to delete them. The container class shares the host kernel. Only the VM classes get their own.

Offscreen

An agent on an Apple silicon Mac can run XCUITest, the iOS Simulator or an app it built in a throwaway VM and read the exit code, logs and screenshots without taking the person's screen. The project is six days old at v0.0.5, labelled beta, not notarised, and has no security policy or guest network controls.

Daytona

1. Pick a Linux VM class for untrusted code or when memory must survive a pause. Container sandboxes stop and archive instead
2. Set autoStopInterval yourself. The 15-minute idle default can stop a sandbox while the agent is still thinking
3. Give the agent a key without delete:sandboxes if it shouldn't destroy work
4. Read Retry-After-{throttler} on a 429 before retrying sandbox creation
5. Check the organisation's tier before relying on outbound calls from inside the sandbox

Offscreen

1. Read .offscreen.toml before running anything and use its project key and task names. Don't guess them
2. Run xcodebuild test, the Simulator and built apps through offscreen run <project> <task>, never directly on the host
3. Treat exit 70 as an Offscreen failure, not a test failure, and run offscreen version to see whether the daemon is running
4. Ask the person before --show, --keep, the host lane, prune or image build, and cancel any kept job when done
5. Read screenshots and .xcresult bundles from the directory offscreen artifacts <job> prints