{"slug": "tart", "name": "Tart", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 6, "commenters": 14, "warners": 2, "score": 5.163, "rising": 0.69, "first": "2026-01-18", "latest": "2026-09-27", "why": "All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 5, "compare": 2, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "tart.run", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://tart.run", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Tart", "tart"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 797870240, "item_id": 49866890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866890", "by": "28304283409234", "date": "2026-09-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "that can easily be adapted to more secure scenarios", "excerpt": "Hardened VMs with no network devices and a serial console talking to it. There are so so so so many ways to do this. Anyone that built ISPs in the 90s can tell you this. Anyone that has built homelabs from scratch can. It is not that hard. It ain't easy. But it is not that hard. At. All. In fact, openai have https://github.com/openai/tart that can easily be adapted to more secure scenarios than whatever the f they ar", "context": "", "use_case": "Hardened VM sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot"}, {"id": 787911936, "item_id": 49244496, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49244496", "by": "iamspoilt", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My take is that the Tart approach is superior to this", "excerpt": "I recently wrote a blog post on using Tart for Macs for something similar that docker is doing here but with better persistence and control. My take is that the Tart approach is superior to this as it gives you a full dev machine with a single command line that allows agents to access files on host, install packages, maintain the vm and do whatever they want to do without compromising the host OS. https://www.mrafaya", "context": "", "use_case": "Full dev VMs on Apple Silicon", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker Sandboxes \u2013 Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"}, {"id": 782465184, "item_id": 48904074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904074", "by": "999_cirno", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.", "excerpt": "Yes! That is arguably the killer feature. You can virtualize macOS in macOS with (nearly) native speed and this is officially supported. Heck, even can run multiple of them at the same time. See docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/virtualize-macos-on-a-mac And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode"}, {"id": 782399968, "item_id": 48899998, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899998", "by": "999_cirno", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Use Tart or VirtualBuddy, both open-source, for a packaged solution", "excerpt": "> require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox All recent Macs come with nearly zero perf cost virtualization. You can easily run Mac or Linux VMs assuming same architecture. Use it all the time for development and whatever. Use Tart or VirtualBuddy, both open-source, for a packaged solution More recently, there are also Apple containers [1] [1] https://github.com/apple/container", "context": "", "use_case": "Packaged VMs for sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode"}, {"id": 767344400, "item_id": 47959025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959025", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "for macOS, tart has been great!", "excerpt": "No mention of http://tart.run? I use parallels for windows and Ubuntu, but for macOS, tart has been great!", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS virtual machines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 775679120, "item_id": 48479945, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479945", "by": "whimblepop", "date": "2026-06-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Why they've chosen this isn't super clear", "excerpt": "To be clear, this does technically meet the very minimal commitment[1] they gave when announcing the acquisition: > In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730194) In this case they moved from one source-available license (Fair Source License v0.9 with seat restric", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS virtualization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Following acquisition by OpenAI, Tart is still proprietary software"}, {"id": 746846273, "item_id": 46677892, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677892", "by": "torarnv", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This feels disingenuous. Tart has unattended setup support as well", "excerpt": "> Lume automates the macOS Setup Assistant via VNC and OCR, creating ready-to-use VMs without manual clicking. Tart relies on Packer plugins for automation. This feels disingenuous. Tart has unattended setup support as well, and it's based on the same VNC + OCR technique as Lume. In fact Tart had it first, and your approach seems to be heavily inspired by it. In addition the boot command instructions you're using cam", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Lume 0.2 \u2013 Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup"}]}], "who": [{"by": "BrandonSmith", "context": "works on a team with Android/iOS devs", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47838473", "date": "2026-04-20"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["hardened vm sandboxing", "full dev vms on apple silicon", "macos vms", "packaged vms for sandboxing", "vm backend for simulators", "macos virtualization"], "compared": [{"slug": "lume", "name": "Lume", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "apple-container", "name": "Apple container", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 788400112, "item_id": 49275007, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49275007", "by": "tg1482", "date": "2026-08-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "use it with herdr or tmux, Ive been obsessed.", "excerpt": "I love lil terminal visuals but lose track of them all the time. tart makes each one a named thing: a manifest, a fetch script, a render script. ad spend, failing cron jobs, whatever Im working on, it gives claude a canvas to paint the state. `uv tool install tartifacts` once installed, ask your agent to use `tart --skill` to get started. use it with herdr or tmux, Ive been obsessed.", "context": "", "use_case": "terminal visuals for agent state", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 782069536, "item_id": 48879346, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879346", "by": "LoganDark", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Hah, another tart: https://github.com/jtdaugherty/tart/", "context": "", "use_case": "Styled text art for MOTD", "switched_from": "", "story": "Text Art Tools"}, {"id": 782067136, "item_id": 48879196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879196", "by": "scriptsmith", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I made these to create styled text art for the MOTD of my university's HPC login node", "excerpt": "I made these to create styled text art for the MOTD of my university's HPC login node: https://github.com/ScriptSmith/tart https://tart.sh/", "context": "", "use_case": "styled text art for MOTD", "switched_from": "", "story": "Text Art Tools"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48896665", "title": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48831384", "title": "Text Art Tools", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730194", "title": "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI shut down Circus CI on Monday, June 1, 2026", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670181", "title": "Show HN: Lume 0.2 \u2013 Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853137", "title": "An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49275006", "title": "item 49275006", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"compare": 1, "warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 797870240, "item_id": 49866890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866890", "by": "28304283409234", "date": "2026-09-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "that can easily be adapted to more secure scenarios", "excerpt": "Hardened VMs with no network devices and a serial console talking to it. There are so so so so many ways to do this. Anyone that built ISPs in the 90s can tell you this. Anyone that has built homelabs from scratch can. It is not that hard. It ain't easy. But it is not that hard. At. All. In fact, openai have https://github.com/openai/tart that can easily be adapted to more secure scenarios than whatever the f they ar", "context": "", "use_case": "Hardened VM sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot"}, {"id": 787911936, "item_id": 49244496, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49244496", "by": "iamspoilt", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My take is that the Tart approach is superior to this", "excerpt": "I recently wrote a blog post on using Tart for Macs for something similar that docker is doing here but with better persistence and control. My take is that the Tart approach is superior to this as it gives you a full dev machine with a single command line that allows agents to access files on host, install packages, maintain the vm and do whatever they want to do without compromising the host OS. https://www.mrafaya", "context": "", "use_case": "Full dev VMs on Apple Silicon", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker Sandboxes \u2013 Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"}, {"id": 782465184, "item_id": 48904074, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904074", "by": "999_cirno", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.", "excerpt": "Yes! That is arguably the killer feature. You can virtualize macOS in macOS with (nearly) native speed and this is officially supported. Heck, even can run multiple of them at the same time. See docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/virtualize-macos-on-a-mac And projects like Tart, VirtualBuddy, etc. provide convenient wrappers for these APIs.", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode"}, {"id": 782399968, "item_id": 48899998, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899998", "by": "999_cirno", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Use Tart or VirtualBuddy, both open-source, for a packaged solution", "excerpt": "> require you to run the agent on your Mac instead of in a Sandbox All recent Macs come with nearly zero perf cost virtualization. You can easily run Mac or Linux VMs assuming same architecture. Use it all the time for development and whatever. Use Tart or VirtualBuddy, both open-source, for a packaged solution More recently, there are also Apple containers [1] [1] https://github.com/apple/container", "context": "", "use_case": "Packaged VMs for sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode"}, {"id": 782368273, "item_id": 48898017, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898017", "by": "kstenerud", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "if you choose the Tart backend", "excerpt": "Yup, I built one! https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai You can even run simulators in it if you choose the Tart backend.", "context": "", "use_case": "VM backend for simulators", "switched_from": "", "story": "Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode"}, {"id": 775679120, "item_id": 48479945, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479945", "by": "whimblepop", "date": "2026-06-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Why they've chosen this isn't super clear", "excerpt": "To be clear, this does technically meet the very minimal commitment[1] they gave when announcing the acquisition: > In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730194) In this case they moved from one source-available license (Fair Source License v0.9 with seat restric", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS virtualization", "switched_from": "", "story": "Following acquisition by OpenAI, Tart is still proprietary software"}, {"id": 775526992, "item_id": 48470437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470437", "by": "emmelaich", "date": "2026-06-09", "stance": "compare", "quote": "AFAICT it's pretty similar", "excerpt": "I'd like to see a comparison to https://tart.run/ as well. AFAICT it's pretty similar.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "macOS Container Machines"}, {"id": 767344400, "item_id": 47959025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47959025", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "for macOS, tart has been great!", "excerpt": "No mention of http://tart.run? I use parallels for windows and Ubuntu, but for macOS, tart has been great!", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS virtual machines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different"}, {"id": 767121488, "item_id": 47945093, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945093", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "http://tart.run makes the VM part easy.", "excerpt": "http://tart.run makes the VM part easy. So what if it's overkill?", "context": "", "use_case": "running macOS VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Drive any macOS app in the background without stealing the cursor"}, {"id": 765415568, "item_id": 47838473, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47838473", "by": "BrandonSmith", "date": "2026-04-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments.", "excerpt": "Continue to upgrade to the latest macOS on your host system, use something that leverages Apple's Virtualized.framework to run any version of macOS you want. For instance, consider https://tart.run/ All the Android / iOS devs on my team use Tart locally when we need to test mixed environments. Then we use Tart's sister Cirrus CLI to run our builds on our server.", "context": "works on a team with Android/iOS devs", "use_case": "running macOS VMs for testing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why macOS27 won't be supporting Intel anymore"}, {"id": 763716736, "item_id": 47732296, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732296", "by": "js2", "date": "2026-04-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "What are your plans for tart licensing going forward?", "excerpt": "What are your plans for tart licensing going forward? https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE https://tart.run/licensing/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI shut down Circus CI on Monday, June 1, 2026"}, {"id": 763700849, "item_id": 47731303, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731303", "by": "rvnx", "date": "2026-04-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API.", "excerpt": "To create an ephemeral (docker-like) MacOS VM on a Mac with full performance and access (e.g. GPU) you have to use a virtualization API provided by Apple. For most CI use, you can choose between: Anka, a \"contact-us for pricing\" closed-source projet, where you have to pay expensive license (easy 3000 USD/yr per machine) or tart, which is a lightweight wrapper around the official Apple API. But you have to know that o", "context": "", "use_case": "Ephemeral macOS VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI shut down Circus CI on Monday, June 1, 2026"}, {"id": 760845316, "item_id": 47552832, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47552832", "by": "kstenerud", "date": "2026-03-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Tart vm on mac", "excerpt": "Not famous last words ;-) I've already shipped this and use it myself every day. I'm the author of yoloAI (https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai), which is built around exactly this model. The agent runs inside a Docker container or containerd vm (or seatbelt container or Tart vm on mac), against a full copy of your project directory. When it's done, `yoloai diff` gives you a unified diff of everything it changed. `yol", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Don't YOLO your file system"}, {"id": 757889009, "item_id": 47368063, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47368063", "by": "fragmede", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS", "excerpt": "http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS if you're technical. It's free for non-commercial uses too! (Don't think there's GPU acceleration tho).", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Parallels Confirms MacBook Neo Can Run Windows in a Virtual Machine"}, {"id": 749749554, "item_id": 46859347, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859347", "by": "strongpigeon", "date": "2026-02-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "using Tart and using VS Code Remote", "excerpt": "Genuinely excited to try this out. I've started using Codex much more heavily in the past two months and honestly, it's been shockingly good. Not perfect mind you, but it keeps impressing me with what it's able to \"get\". It often gets stuff wrong, and at times runs with faulty assumptions, but overall it's no worse than having average L3-L4 engs at your disposal. That being said, the app is stuck at the launch screen", "context": "", "use_case": "macOS VM environments", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Codex App"}, {"id": 747361345, "item_id": 46710084, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710084", "by": "big_toast", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Tart VM or manually doing apple's container CLI is maybe most of the way there", "excerpt": "Yes, I thought OP was going that direction from the title. I keep reading posts hoping someone has found the solution but there's always a draw tradeoff. I think it's important enough that maybe apple will announce something at WWDC. The AIs need better isolation primitives. Running software from un-trusted sources needs easier and better isolation guarantees. Automated builds need lighter weight virtualization optio", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Can you slim macOS down?"}, {"id": 746846273, "item_id": 46677892, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677892", "by": "torarnv", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "This feels disingenuous. Tart has unattended setup support as well", "excerpt": "> Lume automates the macOS Setup Assistant via VNC and OCR, creating ready-to-use VMs without manual clicking. Tart relies on Packer plugins for automation. This feels disingenuous. Tart has unattended setup support as well, and it's based on the same VNC + OCR technique as Lume. In fact Tart had it first, and your approach seems to be heavily inspired by it. In addition the boot command instructions you're using cam", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Lume 0.2 \u2013 Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup"}, {"id": 746787505, "item_id": 46674219, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674219", "by": "frabonacci", "date": "2026-01-18", "stance": "compare", "quote": "We went through the comparison with Tart, Lima etc here", "excerpt": "Both use Apple's Virtualization Framework, so core VM performance is similar. Main differences are around agent-first design (HTTP API, MCP server), unattended setup via VNC + OCR, and registry support for VM images. We've also built a broader ecosystem on top - the Cua computer and agent framework for building computer-use agents: https://cua.ai/docs We went through the comparison with Tart, Lima etc here: https://g", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Lume 0.2 \u2013 Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup"}]}