--- title: “Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How... description: Perplexity's VP of Infrastructure Nate Kupp explains how the company built SPACE, its internal sandbox platform powering the Computer AI agent product. Rather... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: “Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How Perplexity thinks about AI agent sandboxes | daily.dev og:description: Perplexity's VP of Infrastructure Nate Kupp explains how the company built SPACE, its internal sandbox platform powering the Computer AI agent product. Rather... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/sQOaLDpvo.png og:image:alt: “Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How Perplexity thinks about AI agent sandboxes og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # “Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How Perplexity thinks about AI agent sandboxes **[The New Stack](https://daily.dev/sources/newstack)** · 6 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Perplexity's VP of Infrastructure Nate Kupp explains how the company built SPACE, its internal sandbox platform powering the Computer AI agent product. Rather than treating isolation as the core challenge, Perplexity focused on state management — enabling agent sessions to pause, resume, fork, and persist across clusters for days or weeks. SPACE uses Firecracker microVMs and Kubernetes at its base, but the key innovation is a control plane built on Btrfs copy-on-write snapshots, enabling cheap forks and rolling session snapshots (including live memory) with up to one week of rewind. Perplexity claims 3x+ performance improvements over incumbent providers with significant cost reductions. Security is handled through configurable knobs rather than hard trade-offs, including just-in-time access provisioning and per-tool-call controls. SPACE will soon be offered as an external API product, and Perplexity is exploring local/hybrid deployments via Nvidia's RTX Spark platform. Kupp also flags an emerging CPU capacity constraint as long-running agent sessions grow in prevalence. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [New Perplexity APIs give developers access to agentic workflows and orchestration](https://daily.dev/posts/new-perplexity-apis-give-developers-access-to-agentic-workflows-and-orchestration-w8vfpb1xk) · The New Stack · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Perplexity: Everything is Computer](https://daily.dev/posts/perplexity-everything-is-computer-8unfn0tjn) · The Register · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"“Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How Perplexity thinks about AI agent sandboxes","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo"},"datePublished":"2026-07-29T15:35:48.332Z","dateModified":"2026-07-29T15:36:13.554Z","description":"Perplexity's VP of Infrastructure Nate Kupp explains how the company built SPACE, its internal sandbox platform powering the Computer AI agent product. Rather...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/12fbcf6f9133e3dd10a2534f12e33be4?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/12fbcf6f9133e3dd10a2534f12e33be4?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"The New Stack","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The New Stack","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/newstack","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/newstack"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/stateful-systems-are-incredibly-hard-to-build-how-perplexity-thinks-about-ai-agent-sandboxes-sqoaldpvo","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"linux,ai-agents","timeRequired":"PT6M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The New Stack","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/newstack"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"“Stateful systems are incredibly hard to build”: How Perplexity thinks about AI agent sandboxes"}]} ```