Cattle, Not Pets — Spin Your Agent a Throwaway Micro-VM
Vibe Coding Nights #43 — Cattle, Not Pets. Builder night on ephemeral compute for coding agents: why a full VM beats a container when the task is hostile (own kernel, contained at the hardware-virtualization line rather than a namespace), how cloud-init plus a golden snapshot turns spin-up from an install into a thaw, and the spin/inject/run/collect/destroy lifecycle as one script you keep. Multipass and Lima as the on-ramp, Firecracker as the sub-second stretch. 16 slides, four hands-on labs with per-OS tabs. NOTE: the deck was BUILT 2026-07-30, after the event — #43 ran with only a SPINE.md, which is why it was the one delivered VCN session missing from /presentations. It is a faithful rendering of that spine, not a transcript, and it carries four documented corrections where the spine's draft was wrong (most consequentially the lab script, whose launch-then-restore sequence would not have run).
Open the deck ↗Rayyan Zahid · Deck · Vibe Coding Nights #43 — Cattle, Not Pets. Builder night on ephemeral compute for coding agents: why a full VM beats a container when the task is hostile (own kernel, contained at the hardware-virtualization line rather than a namespace), how cloud-init plus a golden snapshot turns spin-up from an install into a thaw, and the spin/inject/run/collect/destroy lifecycle as one script you keep. Multipass and Lima as the on-ramp, Firecracker as the sub-second stretch. 16 slides, four hands-on labs with per-OS tabs. NOTE: the deck was BUILT 2026-07-30, after the event — #43 ran with only a SPINE.md, which is why it was the one delivered VCN session missing from /presentations. It is a faithful rendering of that spine, not a transcript, and it carries four documented corrections where the spine's draft was wrong (most consequentially the lab script, whose launch-then-restore sequence would not have run).