Switching to Claude Code and VSCode Inside Docker

2-ish questions:

Is this level of fear typical or reasonable? If so, why doesn’t Anthropic / AI code gen providers offer this type of service? Hard to believe Anthropic is not secure in some sense — like what if Claude Code is already inside some container-like thing?

Is it actually true that Claude cannot bust out of the container?

I put in a full day trying to get Claude Code and VSCode to work inside Docker. I wasn't able to get the window to properly display in my wayland session.

If you are a VSCode hater (like me), you can achieve the same thing using the open-source, Microsoft-built, official devcontainer CLI [0], which is exactly what VSCode uses under the hood. You don't get automatic port forwarding with this tool, which includes SSH Agent forwarding, so you'll likely want to pair this with installing SSH into your devcontainers, or using some other tool that does the job. I built a tool [1] to do the port forwarding part, which I'd like to be more magic like VSCode's but haven't put the effort into doing, since it works for my purposes.

Using these, I can SSH into my devserver, use the devcontainer CLI to open a tmux session with iTerm2 Tmux integration, and it feels just like a local window. Combine that with Neovide and remote Neovim over the same channel, and I have a native-feeling dev environment running on a remote devcontainer in a nearby data center.

[0] https://github.com/devcontainers/cli

[1] https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm

I haven't found that to be the case. I have used cc within an container and on the host machine and it has been fine. Any command that could cause changes to your system you MUST approve when using it in agent mode.

I have enjoyed running Claude Code in a container. The biggest advantage for me isn't security though, it's how easy it becomes to spin off agents to work in the background.

I use a simple script that copies my working directory into a container, prompts Claude Code, and then either saves a planning document locally, or opens a pull request in GitHub for me to review.

I quite like this because it makes starting agents when I have ideas really frictionless, and then I can easily discard the results and try again if it went off the rails. The Max plan makes me not worry about the cost of this whole process as well.

I also set up containers initially out of caution, but honestly, I've never seen Claude Code do anything that git couldn't easily reverse, so I'm not that worried about that any more.