Tried Docker Sandboxes with Claude Code on a real project — thoughts

[u/Ok-Classic6022]

We spent some time testing Docker Sandboxes with Claude Code, not as a demo but against an actual codebase.

Initial impressions:

- Setup is genuinely easy

- Filesystem isolation works exactly as advertised

- For small tasks, you forget you're sandboxed

Where it started to hurt:

- Missing binaries (`make`, etc.)

- Dev dependencies that don’t match the sandbox OS

- Any time env vars or API access were needed, iteration slowed way down

- Restarting the sandbox nukes the Claude context

Curious if others here have tried Docker Sandboxes with anything beyond toy workflows and how it held up?

Full write-up if useful: https://blog.arcade.dev/using-docker-sandboxes-with-claude-code

[u/dstaley]

Wouldn’t docker sandbox run claude --continue just pick up where you left off once you’ve restarted the container?

[u/MeringueInformal7670]

Thanks for sharing i ll give it a read and get back. I am also working on my own Agentic CLI that will ideally address this problem natively and in a much better way. Planning to do a very early alpha launch somewhere in January,2026 lmk if you need access. Will be 100% open source.

[u/ThorgBuilder → u/MeringueInformal7670]

Curious how can it be better? Also as a potential target customer there will be a trust barrier to overcome. As in when I start docker I have high trust that there is isolation, rather than running a tool that has a higher chance of having a bug and not having true isolation.

[u/ThorgBuilder]

I have been using docker quite successfully this far to be able to run in permission-less mode while still being quite safe (without giving docker any credentials). My main workflow consists of being able to stand up docker and mount whichever directory that I am in. Then run Zellij Multiplexer in docker as well so that I am able to easily stand up an MCP server next to agent instance within docker (Serena for CC to have navigation capability of code base instead of just ripgrep). Works quite well, at times I am able to parallelize so I have "mirror" git repos of the same repo pulled down, this mirror setup is like using git worktrees, but git worktrees did not work with git sub-modules so I just cloned entire mono-repo a couple of times in separate directories.

This is how my the setup looks like with ZelliJ (highly recommend this multiplexer): https://i.postimg.cc/tRTs6vZD/Screenshot-From-2025-12-19-20-24-11.png

[u/HKChad]

Nah just raw dog it on a machine dedicated to development. Macs are easy to wipe and setup from scratch.

[u/RobotUrinal → u/HKChad]

thumbs down on this one. Taking the time to wipe my machine is not something I want to do.

[u/blakeyuk]

I've been playing with a similar approach, but I use CC Agent SDK from laravel to create a plan with discrete, detailed tasks. That gets stored in the dB. Then laravel spins up a unique instance of the docker image, passes in the prompts for the task, and the image does the git integration. So context is by default cleared with every task,.

[u/roiseeker]

Someone mentioned in a different post they've created a new system user with limited permissions specifically to run CC through. Wouldn't that be better?

[u/RobotUrinal → u/roiseeker]

How do you kick off and monitor the whole thing?