This looks like a really solid app. I like that it's 17 MB and uses the ContainerAPIClient library directly.
28 commits in 3 days, 5,015 lines of Swift, every commit "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5".
Also neat that it's signed/notarized. I installed it and it downloaded the necessary container platform stuff on first launch.
Suggestion: add a getting started tutorial to the site which suggests an image to try out and has screenshots (or a silent video) showing you how to get that image up and running and what you can do with it.
The create image dialog suggests "nginx:latest" but that's not a great starting demo.
Really nice. Worked perfectly downloading the runtime and running nginx:latest.
It's getting to the point that scrolling down on Github and seeing Claude as a contributor is a signal the app will be good (Native feeling, no Electron, etc)
Docker desktop on mac does not work well (uses lots of resources) and my current alternative is OrbStack (very slick, uses far less resources, but freemium).
Unrelated. I noticed that the settings window (Cmd-,) text inputs all type from the right instead of the left like older macOS inputs (or web inputs[0])
Is that a thing macOS is moving to? I'm sure I've seen Apple use these too.
It appears macOS native containers runs a separate Linux VM per container.
OrbStack's claim to fame is that all containers run in a single Linux VM, with lots of optimizations on both sides of the VM boundary (including use of a sparse image file for disk storage, which saves a lot of space on the macOS side).
If you run more than 4-5 containers on macOS, the performance and resource usage savings of OrbStack really starts to add up quickly.
Yeah. I don't quite understand this. Can I use this instead of docker desktop, to run docker containers on my mac 'natively' ? Or this is completely separate from docker ?
Yes, this is a separate runtime. Docker handles containerization differently with more overhead. OCI is a 'standard' way of constructing container images and both are compatible with OCI.
Kinda interestingly: it zips to 17MB, but the binary looks to be 56MB (davit.app/contents/macos/davit). That seems like a surprising amount of compression for a binary - embedded assets maybe? Possibly this is normal for mac apps though?
Shipped in 0.1.8; Images -> Build Image (context dir, tag, build args). It drives Apple's buildkit shim directly over vsock, no docker needed. brew upgrade davit or the in-app updater will get it.
My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
I had an idea like this and thought I could vibe code it, but then I figured someone else would care more and do it first. I was right!
This looks like a great app and I'm excited to try it out.
Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
More awesome: let me provision multiple user accounts inside the VM and restrict filesystem / network policy by user. Then I can have a dev agent, QA agent, etc. each with its own view of the work. That would be a powerful base layer for further automation.
Of course I should be able to provision various resources "attached" to the VM that agents can use on a permissioned basis; e.g., DB, queue, external volume, and so forth.
> My current power move in the age of AI: do nothing.
This was also my strategy before AI. At some point in my late 20s or early 30s I all but completely stopped doing any development in my free time, because I was entirely over any fun I derived from coding per se (in truth, I'd never been that into it, I'd just been really bad at guessing what would or would not be worth spending time on) and, as they say, the "juice wasn't worth the squeeze" for almost anything that popped into my head that might be a nice program or script to have (like that xkcd chart about the payoff time for developing programs that save X minutes per week or whatever) or else it was something that wasn't necessary but might just be interesting or fun to have, but nowhere near worth the many hours it'd take to make it happen. If someone made what I wanted and released it, awesome! If not, oh well.
The big change with LLMs is now I can shit out little scripts and such in a few minutes and for pennies, maybe a couple dollars. I'm dragging old extremely-niche ideas out of mothballs because what would have been several weekends of work (most of these ideas would require lots of poking around unfamiliar APIs and documentation, not just immediately writing the thing I want) can now be done in a half-hour or less—or, at least, I can find out if something's going to be unworkable or too fiddly to screw with after all and should be completely and permanently abandoned, in minutes rather than hours.
How does this compare to OrbStack? Do Apple Containers offer anything in the dev experience that I would notice? OrbStack’s implementation already feels lightning fast for my usage.
44 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 66.8 ms ] thread- https://github.com/tdeverx/contained-app
- https://github.com/tofa84/berth
28 commits in 3 days, 5,015 lines of Swift, every commit "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5".
Also neat that it's signed/notarized. I installed it and it downloaded the necessary container platform stuff on first launch.
Suggestion: add a getting started tutorial to the site which suggests an image to try out and has screenshots (or a silent video) showing you how to get that image up and running and what you can do with it.
The create image dialog suggests "nginx:latest" but that's not a great starting demo.
Looks like great work, will try it soon!
It's getting to the point that scrolling down on Github and seeing Claude as a contributor is a signal the app will be good (Native feeling, no Electron, etc)
Docker desktop on mac does not work well (uses lots of resources) and my current alternative is OrbStack (very slick, uses far less resources, but freemium).
Good name for this app, BTW.
Is that a thing macOS is moving to? I'm sure I've seen Apple use these too.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I'll give this a try though.
OrbStack's claim to fame is that all containers run in a single Linux VM, with lots of optimizations on both sides of the VM boundary (including use of a sparse image file for disk storage, which saves a lot of space on the macOS side).
If you run more than 4-5 containers on macOS, the performance and resource usage savings of OrbStack really starts to add up quickly.
Oh goodness what have we come to? I know we're comparing to electron monstrosities, but still
I had an idea like this and thought I could vibe code it, but then I figured someone else would care more and do it first. I was right!
This looks like a great app and I'm excited to try it out.
Free idea: I would like to be able to "jail" an agent inside a VM and send instructions to the harness from outside the VM to agent(s) installed inside. Ideally there is no Codex/Claude/etc. installed on the host.
More awesome: let me provision multiple user accounts inside the VM and restrict filesystem / network policy by user. Then I can have a dev agent, QA agent, etc. each with its own view of the work. That would be a powerful base layer for further automation.
Of course I should be able to provision various resources "attached" to the VM that agents can use on a permissioned basis; e.g., DB, queue, external volume, and so forth.
This was also my strategy before AI. At some point in my late 20s or early 30s I all but completely stopped doing any development in my free time, because I was entirely over any fun I derived from coding per se (in truth, I'd never been that into it, I'd just been really bad at guessing what would or would not be worth spending time on) and, as they say, the "juice wasn't worth the squeeze" for almost anything that popped into my head that might be a nice program or script to have (like that xkcd chart about the payoff time for developing programs that save X minutes per week or whatever) or else it was something that wasn't necessary but might just be interesting or fun to have, but nowhere near worth the many hours it'd take to make it happen. If someone made what I wanted and released it, awesome! If not, oh well.
The big change with LLMs is now I can shit out little scripts and such in a few minutes and for pennies, maybe a couple dollars. I'm dragging old extremely-niche ideas out of mothballs because what would have been several weekends of work (most of these ideas would require lots of poking around unfamiliar APIs and documentation, not just immediately writing the thing I want) can now be done in a half-hour or less—or, at least, I can find out if something's going to be unworkable or too fiddly to screw with after all and should be completely and permanently abandoned, in minutes rather than hours.
https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault
Sweet, regardless of the AI help.
If anything even more so, no excuses for lazy Electron, with AI helping hand.
Kudos.
I like it! I would like it even more if we could choose which terminal app the containers open in. Is that doable?