Background / 24-7 worker (Box)

Use this when work must keep running unattended: a queue worker, a Telegram/Discord bot, a polling agent, a scheduled scraper, or any always-on service. Ephemeral sandboxes (E2B microVMs, Codespaces) auto-die on a timer — wrong tool. A Box can be told to never auto-stop, persists its disk, and keeps a dedicated IPv4.

Why Box

• No session cap — runs hours/days/indefinitely.
• Persistent + resumable — disk survives stop; box resume brings it back.
• Cheap steady-state — flat per-second pricing beats ephemeral providers (50 always-on VMs ≈ $432/mo vs ~$4k+).

Prereqs

curl -fsSL https://box.ascii.dev/install | sh, then box login "$BOX_API_KEY" --json.

Recipe