Concept

Disposable environment

You might say: ephemeral runner, clean workspace, one-shot worker

A fresh environment is created for one run and then wiped or discarded. The run carries its durable state through the ticket tracker, git host, and orchestrator.

What it does
Limits cross-run contamination and gives each task a repeatable starting point.
Ask
What evidence shows that this workspace began clean and will be removed?
Typical
One job per ephemeral runner is the usual boundary. A cache or artifact store may outlive the workspace by explicit policy.
Trouble
Credentials, untracked files, or processes from an earlier run appear in a later run.

What to look for

  1. A new runner identifier on every run
  2. A workspace creation and teardown event
  3. No previous run files in the checkout

Pattern

Stateless worker with external memory

Sources

  1. GitHub, Choosing the runner for a job, Choosing GitHub-hosted runnersIf you use a GitHub-hosted runner, each job runs in a fresh instance of a runner image specified by `runs-on`.
  2. GitHub, Self-hosted runners reference, Ephemeral runners for autoscalingThis approach allows you to manage your runners as ephemeral systems, since you can use automation to provide a clean environment for each job.
  3. E2B, Security and compliance, Isolation and tenancySandboxes are destroyed on timeout or shutdown. Filesystem and memory state can be preserved across a pause and restored on resume.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Disposable environment" (disposable-environment) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal