A new way to work. Durable, stateful environments are available now!
Minimal’s early access has been spectacular. We’ve really enjoyed building this new product alongside our design partners and community members, and we’ve seen firsthand how it’s enabling developers and agents to work faster. We’re excited to keep that momentum going by releasing Sessions!
So far, Minimal has operated through Tasks: transitory sandboxes for interactive dev environments and non-interactive workflows. But as technology has developed and workflows have become more complicated, we wanted to ensure that Minimal would support more complex executions and remain a safe place for parallel agentic execution. By releasing Sessions, we aim to make Minimal more convenient for our users regardless of their workflows while also maintaining environment isolation and keeping every build well documented.
Continuous safety for devs and agents
Sessions are durable isolated environments that are stateful, preloaded with your favorite tools, and lightning fast. While Tasks are meant to be quick execution environments, Sessions are in it for the long haul. Now, your working environments—still those isolated microVMs—are durable and natively aware of important context, like your Git worktrees, file patches, and tool configurations.
An overview of the available Sessions, configuration, and Session creation.
In addition to a streamlined boot, Sessions are meant to provide a space for continuous operation. You can detach and reattach from an environment at any point, and it will continue to work with everything intact. Agentic workflows can operate in parallel, dedicated machines can run continuous tasks, and you can check on them whenever.
When you detach from a Session, you can choose to keep it running or delete it forever. All Sessions natively support the Minimal Package manager, meaning that you can add packages whenever you need one. And because packages are cached after the first fetch, they are immediately ready to use for subsequent installation.
Your tools, every time
Every Session can work in conjunction with a loadout, pre-configured workspaces that are equipped with your preferred tools. Loadouts are user level customizations that don’t affect project level dependencies. They can inject tools, files, and env vars, and even customize your layout.
A Minimal Session preconfigured with Claude, a list of available commands, and the text editor Vim.
Want to see everything in action? Check out our Sessions walkthrough video.
Ready to build?
We’re excited to provide a new, streamlined way to boot our isolated environments. Sessions are available now by downloading the newest version of Minimal on our website or migrating to Minimal’s Alpha release.
Check out the Migration Guide!
Have a question? Read the Sessions Docs, join our Discord, or check below.
F.A.Q.
Can I run sessions on different computers?
Yes! Sessions can be run on different OS locally. Sessions can also run on different instances of Minimal on different computers. This alpha release does not support remote execution, but we are adding this capability soon.
Is there a time limit to how long I can have a session paused?
Sessions are durable environments that have no time limit on how long they can be active or paused, providing the underlying host is still around.
Will I receive a notification if there’s an error in a session I’ve detached from?
This alpha release does not support notifications of session status for the user.
Can I share my sessions with other devs or agents?
Not yet, but this is an ergonomic we want to really refine over the next few weeks.
Can I have more than one loadout?
Yes, you can have more than one loadout configuration. Loadouts are added to a session with --loadout when creating a session.
Known Issues
- zelliJ will take a few seconds to compile its bundled WASM plugins on the first start of a new session. Subsequent launches to the session do not have delays.
- Non-interactive tasks are not supported yet. If you are currently using non-interactive tasks in Minimal, it is advised to not upgrade at the moment.
- Support for remote session and secrets management will roll out in future updates!