How Boxy appears in the material Boxy comes up when Ryan Nystrom, a software engineer on Notion AI, explains how his agent gets a real computer to work on. Out of the box, Notion AI uses Vercel sandboxes — useful, but limited and starting from scratch every time. Notion instead built Boxy: an internal project of pre-built virtual machines for on-demand remote computing in the cloud. When Notion AI connects to a Boxy machine, the agent can run commands and explore the actual codebase — for example, figuring out how the new model selector works [^7d2a9b32-b281-5828-9eb1-bf812129ae58@0]. Why it matters in the workflow Boxy is one of the pieces that lets Ryan hand off work fully and walk away: everything runs in the cloud, so he sends the message, closes the tab, and goes to a meeting. Before, he used Cursor connected to the repository via Boxy or locally — now the agent works against a cloud-connected environment natively, with Notion as the source of truth for all context. - Boxy is Notion's internal project of pre-built cloud VMs for on-demand remote computing. - It replaces limited, from-scratch sandboxes as the machine the coding agent connects to. - With a Boxy machine, the agent can run commands and explore the real codebase while the human is away.