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by mehdibl 79 days ago
Docker is hard to setup. The author made a nice solution but not sure if he know devcontainer and what he can do. You do the setup once and you roll in most dev tools. I'm still surprised the effort people put in such solution ignore the dev's core requirements, like sharing the env they use in a simple way. You used it to have custom env and isolate the agent. You want to persist your credentials? Mount the target folder from home or sl into a sub folder. Might be knowledge. But for Linux or even Windows/Mac as long you don't need desktop fully. Devcontainer is simple. A standard that works. And it's very mature.
1 comments

I'm surprised from reading these comments that more people aren't chiming in to ask why this solution is better than a dev container. That seems like the obviously best way to setup security boundaries that don't require you to still trust that AI will do what you ask it. You can run it remotely and it's portable etc.
Please use a dev container! Empirically, a lot of people don't, and some people regularly enable YOLO mode on their actual laptops. So if you've never run a code assistant outside of a dev container, that's fantastic and I don't want to change your behavior. But be honest with yourself--if you aren't 100% consistent about using a container, then jai may be for you, because it just works in every single scenario.

I can honestly say that since developing jai, I haven't run an assistant outside of a container. In fact, I now only have the assistants installed inside containers, so if I run `claude`, command not found, it has to be `jai claude`. The only place I have to run outside of jai is for testing jai itself, for which I use a virtual machine and just let the assistant have root, but that's a heavyweight environment I'm forced to use for this particular problem domain.