LayerFS Slashes AI Workspace Setup to 0.05 Seconds

LayerFS can spin up a full AI coding workspace in 0.05 seconds, slashing a typical five‑minute install. Agents spend about eighty percent of their compute time thinking and only ten percent actually running Bash commands. Each file tool call becomes an atomic Store operation. Every Bash call mounts an ephemeral workspace that commits when it finishes. Agents on different machines all write to the same serverless Store, so no central database is needed. A commit is recorded for each tool call, giving a branch‑level history where conflicts are rejected outright. The system can fork any commit recursively without copying files, because a fork is just metadata. Ten identical copies of data shrink to 0.31 of their size after deduplication and compression, a 70 percent reduction. Ignored files stay in every commit, unlike Git‑based AgentFS which drops them and forces reinstall. The creators say this makes AI coding agents run as fast as a single laptop without any storage bottleneck.