START: Benjamin Swerdlow, CEO & Co-Founder, Freestyle: "Full Linux VMs for AI Agents. Built for complex tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks."

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“I don't believe Claude Code will exist in its current form in six months”

Ben Swerdlow, founder of Freestyle, thinks coding agents are moving from local machines to the cloud, where a single task could get the attention of 20 agents at once.

Each gets a complete copy of your stack, production environment included. Each can spend a week testing and refining its approach. You compare the results and take the best one forward.

The economics aren’t there yet. Ben expects cost per task to fall another 99% over the next four years, making that level of parallel work practical.

Freestyle builds the computers for it: full Linux VMs for tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks. Clone a running machine, memory included, and let agents pursue different approaches from the same starting point. Pause and resume with their state intact.

Inside Freestyle, Ben already gives agents a week to find improvements to its VM technology. Roughly 700 tests and 90 metrics help the team judge whether the work made things better.

He calls this goal engineering: define the outcome clearly, give agents time to work toward it, and measure whether they’re making progress.

"Full Linux VMs for AI Agents"

Built for complex tasks that run for hours, days, or weeks
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🎙️ Benjamin Swerdlow, CEO & Co-Founder, Freestyle on Fondo START

00:57 Why coding agents could move from local to the cloud
02:22 From harness engineering to goal engineering
03:08 Giving agents a week to improve measurable results
04:13 Why defining the problem becomes the bottleneck
04:48 How early access to o1 changed Freestyle’s direction
05:51 Why frustrated sandbox users revealed a bigger opportunity
07:28 Giving agents a computer instead of building custom tools
08:12 Getting into YC
11:17 Snapshotting VMs and running agents in parallel
12:24 The economics of letting multiple agents attempt every task
13:26 How GPU supply could drive down agent costs
15:09 Try Freestyle and follow Ben

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Learn more at freestyle.sh