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Posted by saikatsg 3 hours ago

Docker Agent(github.com)
115 points | 51 comments
rodolphoarruda 28 seconds ago|
Last year (2025), I lost count of how many times I tried using an LLM to set up Docker. It was still the era of prompting, then copy-pasting the response and seeing if it worked... and it almost never did. It’s great to see this new Docker agent. For me, it would be even more appealing to see an agent and a model specialized in Docker working together, capable of proposing advanced configurations and getting them working on the first try.
CBLT 1 hour ago||
I tried really hard to make this work for me a couple of weeks ago but it was the brittlest harness out of any that I've used. I'd come back when it's more mature.
triyambakam 46 minutes ago||
> bittlest

Sorry, what do you mean there?

shawabawa3 41 minutes ago||
Typo for brittlest, most brittle
CBLT 19 minutes ago||
Correct. Updated the message to brittlest. Thank you.
dgageot 1 hour ago||
Would love to know what didn't work for you
CBLT 55 minutes ago||
Sessions just broke all the time for me. The one time I dug into it, it ended up being a known issue where if codex returned over 10k characters for a turn it breaks the session. Because docker agent does not use protocols like ACP, instead trying to parse Codex's internal state in a brittle manner.

I tried not to do anything too crazy, but even use using an API key in the docker agent natively was getting me sessions that would hang and couldn't be recovered.

dgageot 51 minutes ago||
Combination with Codex is indeed not the most common use case around us. I'll see what can be improved. Sorry that it broke your workflow!
nujabe 31 minutes ago||
How is not using it with the most popular coding agent not a common use case?
girvo 17 minutes ago||
Not the most common use case around them: likely meaning that the Codex harness isn’t used that often internally at Docker, is what I would surmise, at least that is how I read it.

I work at another big tech company, and up until recently that would’ve been true for us as well (but it’s changed now, we partnered with OpenAI)

McScrooge 2 hours ago||
https://docker.github.io/docker-agent/configuration/sandbox/

If, like me, you couldn't find any security-related info on the linked page.

gregwebs 1 hour ago||
Docker Agent is a harness. There is a sandbox mode that can be used to run it in docker sandbox (a VM, not a container). If you don't use sandbox mode then I assume it is running in a container.

If you don't want to use their harness then you wouldn't use docker agent and instead use their `sbx` cli to run the harness of your choice (claude, codex, pi, etc).

I think it will be great if Docker can get people used to using secure VMs. I am developing a similar project (still a work in progress): https://github.com/gregwebs/agent-vm

genghisjahn 53 minutes ago||
I've found sbx to be very helpful. really like the sentinel value wrapper they have going so you can add secrets but the model can't see them. Outbound calls get looked up by sentinel value and the real one goes out to whatever API you're auth'ing too. There's other features but just having claude run in a sandbox and easily see what it does and doesn't have access to has been great.
ShinyLeftPad 1 hour ago||
i remember going through the entire docs of docker sandbox and there was not one mention of attack vectors. did they fix that?
kydanet 49 minutes ago||
[flagged]
blakeashleyjr 2 hours ago||
While I love new open source dev (especially in Go!), agent harnesses are turning into JS frameworks from yesteryear.

All the cool kids have one!

yipinwong 22 minutes ago||
You know which one will win for sure. ones with the worst experience.

Vue and svelte are easy to use and learn/adopt. But look what won. React.js.

So whatever the ai agent with the vast user basae will win regardless.

---

I know it's a slippery slope, but given you brought up JS framwork analogy, I had to fall into it

girvo 12 minutes ago||
I mean as someone who was there at the time, early React was easy to learn and adopt. It’s complexity came later after it had already won

Now Angular v1, man… if I ever see another digest loop error in my life, I will scream

pjmlp 2 hours ago|||
Coupled with VSCode forks to manage them
ChaseRensberger 35 minutes ago|||
none are as great as https://wingman.actor!

jk its trash

caskeycoding 2 hours ago|||
[flagged]
verdverm 2 hours ago||
Go doesn't have a good mod/plugin story for harness devs to provide to their users

I say this as a gopher who also has a custom harness written in Go, it's a real challenge compared to the TS setups, but TS plugins are also a security concern

gandreani 1 hour ago|||
I agree! Comes with the territory of a compiled language I suppose?

I haven't given this much thought (I also just started with golang last year) but I'm assuming the only real path here is to provide extension SDKs in Lua or other languages whose interpreters have been implemented in go.

I think that's what grafana's k6 [1] does with a JS interpreter

[1] https://github.com/grafana/k6

ChaseRensberger 35 minutes ago|||
curious your thoughts on my approach: https://docs.wingman.actor/extend/plugin-quickstart/
beckford 2 hours ago||
Docker Agent could be beneficial for research studies. For example, while writing a ML paper about agents I need to rerun experiments so that: - others can repeat my results - validate that variability from LLMs is not causing overconfidence in the results

But currently uv is good enough to create isolated, repeatable environments. And it isn't limited to Linux like standard Docker. So when I want to test small samples on my local PC's GPU (Windows or mac) before running on beefier hardware, I can do that easily.

maxdo 2 hours ago||
they hope they can annoy and email every person in the org asking for money , same way as they did it with docker.

looks like a weird abstractions. why do i need this if i have modal.com, e2b, cloudflare that use original docker + some toolings around + way to run + isolations on network level.

tamimio 2 hours ago||
>What it is, what it isn’t

Yep, open ai sol model wrote that.

lukemercado 2 hours ago||
It frustrates me that there's a prisoners dilemma in communicating this to other humans. If I flag it and write it out (as you've done) I've let the author know that they're losing trust and let others know that they should be more skeptical. I've also created the perfect eval data pair for the ai labs. It's deeply frustrating.
baby_souffle 1 hour ago|||
I think the cat is out of the bag.

There was a brief point in time at the beginning of the internet where if you saw an image online you could be kind of confident that it hadn't been manipulated significantly... But somewhere around the mid to late 2000s it became prudent to just assume any image you've seen online got at least a blemish filter pass through something like Photoshop.

Same thing now with written text. Sometimes you'll be a little bit more or less sure than an llm produced the output but never able to say 100% confidently.

cyanydeez 1 hour ago|||
AI is going to eradicate, for good, all trust in the Internet.

That's a benified "not a drawback".

IncreasePosts 2 hours ago||
Your probably spare yourself some RSI by inverting this and only writing out a message when you find human generated content on hn
mplewis 2 hours ago||
What does this have to do with Docker?
speedgoose 2 hours ago||
I guess people at Docker wanted to make an agent.

Having it docker branded, I could understand. It’s confusing but the docker brand is strong.

But exposing it as a docker subcommand is very confusing to me.

dgageot 1 hour ago|||
You don't really have to use the docker agent sub-command. docker-agent is a standalone binary. When it was created, though, 1.5 year ago, the idea was that it would be the docker compose for agents (original name was cagent, compose for agents).

But it evolved differently and although it runs very well in docker containers and docker sandboxes, it also runs very well anywhere else.

binsquare 2 hours ago|||
It reads to me like chasing trends
throwitaway222 2 hours ago|||
That's the economy we've always been in. X is popular, if your company doesn't have a solution for X you're irrelevant.
sleepybrett 1 hour ago||||
that's all docker has been doing for years.
verdverm 2 hours ago|||
the tools and features certainly indicate so
bmacho 2 hours ago|||
Based on the repo short description and the first sentence of the readme:

It is called 'Docker' as the company, and it has nothing to do with the container technology.

redleader55 2 hours ago|||
The quest for staying relevant.
nwhnwh 1 hour ago|||
This made me laugh. Not sure why. But the whole situation is very absurd now.
esafak 1 hour ago|||
It's the Docker you know and love... with AI!
sneak 54 minutes ago||
Docker is rapidly fading into irrelevance now that they have missed their strategic acquisition interval via the Microsoft collab misstep, and now has to hype chase as fewer and fewer people believe in their long term viability as a company.

Great tech. Not a business.

smashah 45 minutes ago||
Why can't we set the harness? Seems like the missing piece
mococa 2 hours ago|
Pretty vague
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