* Asterism

Turn the Mac mini on your desk into an always-on home for your coding agents.

Close the laptop and the agent stops. Asterism boots it into a real VM on the machine under your desk, and that machine is awake at 4am. One command builds the VM, one shells in. 
$ curl -fsSL asterism.run/install.sh | sh
All install options macOS today, Linux from source.
ast · agent 
$ ast create agent --image ubuntu:24.04 --cpus 4 --mem 8Gagent  stopped$ ast snapshot agent cleanagent  snapshot clean$ ast up agentagent  runningguest booting; ssh on 127.0.0.1:2222$ ast ssh agentast@agent:~$

Your agent needs a machine that stays awake.

You rent a VPS for one reason: a laptop sleeps. The box under your desk does not, and it is the better computer. A base Mac mini hands the agent ten cores and 16 GB of RAM; a cheap VPS hands it two shared vCPUs and a monthly bill. Asterism gives the agent a real VM there, with its own kernel and its own disk and no reach into your home directory or your SSH keys. ast up starts it and ast ssh puts you inside. Today you reach that VM from the machine running it. Reaching it from your laptop across the internet is the mesh, and the mesh has not shipped.

Then one computer, assembled from the machines you already have.

An instance is a durable identity, a registry record plus a disk, and each part of a computer plugs into it as a component. A cloud box counts as one more of your devices. Each part defaults to the machine supplying the cpu, and nothing goes remote until you ask for it.

The parts

  • CPU and RAMOne device supplies the pair. Swap the source and the instance reboots there.
  • Root diskFollows the cpu. When the cpu moves, only the delta travels.
  • VolumesThe device holding the data serves it. Attach and detach at any time.
  • GPUThe machine that has one lends it. nvidia-smi inside the instance shows a card that lives elsewhere.
  • EgressPoint it at any device. Rent the cpu in a datacenter and keep your home IP.
  • ServicesSplice a database from another machine so the guest sees it on localhost.
This is where Asterism is going. Today an instance sits on the one device that made it.

You own the code that runs on your machines.

The clients in the repository are open source and run without us. We plan to sell the hosted coordination plane: login, the device directory, NAT traversal, relays. You own the client either way.

Works today

  • Real VMs on macOSQEMU with Hypervisor.framework acceleration, behind a pluggable hypervisor interface.
  • Four distributionsUbuntu, Debian, Fedora and Alpine from the catalog, plus any cloud-image URL or a local qcow2.
  • Copy-on-write diskscloud-init writes your SSH keys in, and host directories pass through over virtio-9p.
  • Snapshot and restoreWith console logs, graceful shutdown, and a registry that survives a reboot.
  • One daemonast talks to a local astd and starts it on demand.

Next

  • The meshPair devices into an orbit with one command and a six-digit code, and skip the port forwarding.
  • Parts across machinesMove an instance, a volume or a GPU between the machines in that orbit.
  • The Mac appYour instances in the menu bar, shipping with the first tagged release.
Install Asterism Read the docs