container-use provides containerized development environments for coding agents. It enables coding agents to complete work in parallel environments without hindering your normal workflow, letting you shift from babysitting one agent at a time to having multiple agents work safely and independently using your preferred tech stack.
Purpose and Positioning This project is a development environment tool for coding agents, with the core goal of supporting multiple agents working in parallel safely and independently. It is positioned as an open-source MCP server and also used as a CLI tool, compatible with Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible agents, and powered by Dagger.
Key Capabilities
- Isolated environments: Each agent gets a fresh container and is on its own git branch. This allows running multiple agents without conflicts, experimenting safely, and instantly discarding failed results.
- Real-time visibility: You can view the full command history and logs to see what agents actually did, not just what they claim to have done.
- Direct intervention: You can enter any agent's terminal, check its status, and take over control when it gets stuck.
- Environment control: Follow standard git workflows; just run git checkout <branch_name> to review any agent's work.
- Universal compatibility: Works with any agent, model, or infrastructure, with no vendor lock-in.
How to Use container-use works with any MCP-compatible agent. Setup is always the same: add container-use stdio as an MCP server. Official complete setup guides are provided for all agents (Cursor, Goose, VSCode, etc.).
Using Claude Code as an example, the container-use command also has the shorthand cu, and both behave identically:
- container-use stdio (used in the documentation)
- cu stdio (shortcut)
After setup, you can ask the agent to create something, for example: Create a hello world app in python using flask
The agent will work in an isolated environment and return a URL for viewing the app and exploring the code.
Use Cases Suitable for scenarios where multiple coding agents need to carry out development work in parallel, safely, and without interfering with each other, especially when you want to use your preferred tech stack whilemaintaining visibility into and control over agent behavior.
Limitations and Status This project is in early development and is still actively evolving. You can provide feedback by submitting an issue or contacting the #container-use channel on Discord. The official materials do not provide other information about pricing, costs, specific platform support scope, or performance results.
