Searching Over Sandbox States for Coding Agents

Experiments with full sandbox snapshots for coding agents found that preserving an agent’s entire machine state can reliably retain files, Git metadata, dependencies, services, databases, and other environment details, but does not generally outperform independent fresh retries on repository-focused Terminal-Bench tasks. Under equal token budgets, fresh retries solved 17 of 25 task-seed pairs compared with 6 of 25 for snapshot branching, partly because useful progress was often already captured in source files and because restored branches can inherit flawed assumptions, require context reconstruction, and divide inference across attempts. However, snapshots proved highly valuable when key progress existed outside Git: in a staged service-repair task requiring both code changes and a SQLite database update, full snapshots solved 4 of 5 continuations while clean restarts and Git-diff restoration solved none. The results suggest that full-environment checkpointing is most useful for longer, stateful agent work involving databases, running services, package installations, browsers, infrastructure, and other persistent systems, while effective methods for choosing valuable checkpoints and transferring context remain open challenges.

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