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Run Ouroboros on a Prized box

Install Ouroboros on a Prized box, so its interview, Seed and build loop drives Claude Code on a cloud Linux machine and keeps going with your laptop closed.

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Ouroboros turns a vague goal into a spec it calls a Seed, then has Claude Code, Codex or another agent build it and check the result. On a Prized box, a run keeps going when you close your laptop.

1. Start a box

Sign up at prized.dev and follow the tour: it starts a box on $30 of free credit with no card, and the command it shows installs the CLI and adds the box to your SSH config (Quickstart). Replace mango with your box's name.

2. Sign Claude Code in on the box

prized agents handoff claude --gh

3. Install Ouroboros

prized ssh mango

Then, on the box:

you@box
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
source ~/.local/bin/env
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Q00/ouroboros/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Install uv first: without it, the Ouroboros installer falls back to pip --user, which Ubuntu 24.04 refuses. The installer finds Claude Code, installs the ouroboros command, and adds the ooo commands to Claude Code.

4. Run a goal

In a git repository on the box (git init in an empty folder is enough):

you@box ~/code/myproject
ouroboros auto "A stdlib-only Python CLI, wordfreq.py, that prints the N most frequent words in a text file, with pytest tests"

Ouroboros answers its own interview, writes a Seed, has Claude Code build it, and reports on each acceptance criterion; this goal took about 6 minutes. prized ssh put you in a tmux session on the box, so the run keeps going when you close the laptop, and prized ssh mango takes you back to it.

5. Open the dashboard

Ouroboros prints a dashboard address such as http://localhost:43809. The dashboard listens only on the box's own localhost, on a port that changes each time, so forward it over SSH from a terminal on your machine, then open the address there:

ssh -N -L 43809:localhost:43809 mango

The Ouroboros dashboard served from the box, open on a laptop: all five acceptance criteria of the wordfreq goal done

When the box sleeps

On the free credit, a box pauses after 2 hours idle, but never in its first 24 hours (Auto-pause). To keep it up while a long run works:

prized box auto-pause mango off

Or give each goal a sandbox

A sandbox is a fresh machine per goal, which you delete afterwards. Nothing is signed in there, so pass your Anthropic API key, or with a Claude subscription CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN from claude setup-token:

ID=$(prized sandbox create --template prized-agent-v1 --env ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" --max-runtime 1h)
prized sandbox exec $ID -- 'curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh && export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" && curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Q00/ouroboros/main/scripts/install.sh | bash'

Run the goal; the output arrives when it ends:

prized sandbox exec $ID --timeout 1h -- 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" && mkdir wordfreq && cd wordfreq && git init -q && ouroboros auto "A stdlib-only Python CLI, wordfreq.py, that prints the N most frequent words in a text file, with pytest tests"'

Copy out what it built:

prized sandbox exec $ID -- 'tar czf wordfreq.tgz wordfreq'
prized sandbox cp $ID:wordfreq.tgz .

Once wordfreq.tgz is on your machine, delete the sandbox:

prized sandbox rm $ID