Scott Hanselman's sandbox-mcp gives agents throwaway Windows PCs

Testing an installer, or running a file a user sent you, is risky on the machine you work on. The common fix is to spin up a Windows virtual machine by hand and copy files in and out. Scott Hanselman's new sandbox-mcp makes an AI agent do that work. It gives the agent "a brand-new Windows PC" for each job, and then throws the PC away.

The project comes as an MCP server and a CLI. It automates Windows Sandbox, the throwaway Windows 11 feature that boots a fresh guest from a blank image. The GitHub repository is shanselman/sandbox-mcp and the licence is MIT. The repository was created on 6 November 2026 and had 246 stars on 7 November 2026. The README says the whole flow is: "boot it, deploy your app, drive the controls, catch the crash, keep the evidence, delete the PC."

What the agent can do

The server registers 16 tools for the agent to call. sandbox_start and sandbox_stop open and close a guest. sandbox_copy_in and sandbox_copy_out move files. sandbox_exec and sandbox_launch run commands. sandbox_click and sandbox_type drive the UI. sandbox_screenshot and sandbox_record_start capture what happened. sandbox_app_errors pulls the crash logs. sandbox_install_test runs an installer and reports what it changed. sandbox_detonate opens an untrusted file inside the guest. sandbox_ui_tree reads the Windows UI Automation tree so the agent can find buttons by name, not by pixel.

The three network modes

The server has three network settings. on is the default and gives the guest normal NAT networking. firewall blocks all outbound traffic from the guest, but keeps a control channel to the host. off turns the network adapter off entirely. In that mode the host and guest talk through a shared folder. That is useful when the test must run offline, or the file being run is not trusted.

What it needs

The guest needs Windows 11 24H2 (build 26100) or later, in the Pro, Enterprise or Education editions. Virtualisation must be on in the BIOS. The host needs 4 GB of RAM at the very least. 8 GB is recommended. It also needs 2 CPU cores and 1 GB of free disk. The CLI needs Node.js 20 or later. A portable release bundles Node.js.

Scott Hanselman is a developer and a Microsoft employee. He published the related gputaskman tool on 4 November 2026. This repository is his own, not an official Microsoft project.

For a team building an agent that has to touch Windows, this cuts out the slow setup step. The whole flow is one tool call. The agent does not need the developer's machine to run Windows. The developer does not need to run an installer twice because the agent did it on their desktop. One guest, one job, one clean-up.

Source

• shanselman/sandbox-mcp on GitHub, Scott Hanselman (MIT).