Lanes & Templates

vibeD exposes a uniform API. You don't pick a runtime — a deterministic classifier inspects the uploaded source and routes it to a lane and a template. You can override either via runtime.lane / runtime.template in the deploy metadata, but that's the exception.

Lanes

Lane	Isolation	Used for
fast	V8 isolates (workerd) or static nginx	Static sites and small trusted-language workers. Sub-second cold start.
general	Kata + Firecracker microVM	Arbitrary code — Node, Python, Go, or any image. Hardware-grade isolation.

The fast lane has two flavors: static-nginx (a sandbox pod serving /workspace) and workerd (V8 isolates managed by a loader). The general lane always runs on a Kata microVM sandbox.

The classifier

internal/classifier is a pure, deterministic function that reads only file names and package.json top-level keys — it never installs anything and runs in well under 50 ms. Rules run in order, first match wins:

1. No server-side code (only .html/.css/.js/images, no package.json/requirements.txt/Dockerfile) → fast, static-nginx.
2. package.json with only browser deps + a build script → build asynchronously, serve the output from static-nginx.
3. worker.js / worker.ts / wrangler.toml → fast, workerd.
4. package.json (Node app with deps) → general, node-24.
5. requirements.txt / pyproject.toml → general, python-313.
6. go.mod → general, go-123.
7. Dockerfile at root → general, base-al2023 (the Dockerfile is a hint for the start command, not built).
8. Else → general, base-al2023 with entrypoint autodetection.

Templates

A template is a directory under templates/ with a Dockerfile, an entrypoint.sh, and a template.yaml (the SandboxTemplate + SandboxWarmPool manifests). Template images are built by CI on template changes, never per deploy, and each embeds vibed-agent as PID 1.

The shipped template set:

Template	Base	Lane	Default warm pool
node-24	node:24	general	50
python-313	python:3.13	general	50
go-123	golang:1.23	general	20
base-al2023	amazonlinux:2023	general	30
static-nginx	nginx:alpine	fast	30

note

refactor.md lists additional templates (node-22, bun-1, deno-2) as design targets. The five above are what currently ship; the others are not yet built. Warm-pool sizes are starting values in values.yaml.

Source injection, not image builds

The deploy path never builds an image. The user's source is a gzipped tarball; vibed-agent extracts it into /workspace inside a pre-booted sandbox and starts the process. New runtime/dependency combinations are handled by an async template builder that refreshes the warm pool out of band — it never blocks a user-visible deploy.