Offscreen vs SPACE

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.

SPACE

Once deployed, SPACE's native API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 contract, stable error codes with a retryable flag and 24-hour idempotency keys, and egress and credential controls sit outside the VM. A person must first deploy it on a Linux x86_64 host with KVM and Kubernetes. Version 0.8.0 has no tagged release, changelog or public container images.

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

SPACE

1. Ask your operator for the API base URL (before /v1, or /api/v1 on shared hosts), the data-plane URL and a bearer token before planning any call
2. Poll the returned operation until it succeeds and the sandbox is running before creating a command. A 202 response is not readiness
3. Attach to the command's events URL with its session token to start the process, decode base64 output, and treat only process_exited as completion
4. Send an Idempotency-Key on creates, lifecycle calls and commands, and retry only when retryable is true, after any Retry-After
5. Save output as it arrives. Reconnecting with Last-Event-ID returns resync_required, not the missed output