We love Claude Code, but wanted to solve some of the problems that come from running multiple agents in parallel (ex: merge conflicts with multiple agents, reinstalling dependencies with git worktrees, Claude Code could deleting your home directory, etc).
Sculptor is a desktop app that lets you safely run Claude Code agents by putting them in separate docker containers. This lets you use Claude without having to compromise on security or deal with annoying tool permission prompts. Then you can just tell Claude to keep running the code until it actually works.
To help you easily work with containerized agents, we created “Pairing Mode”: bidirectionally sync the agent’s code into your IDE and test/edit together in real time. You can also simply pull and push manually if you want.
We have some more cool features planned on our roadmap that are enabled by this approach, like the ability to “fork” conversations (and the entire state of the container), or roll back to a previous state.
It’s still very early, but we would love your feedback.
Sculptor itself is free to use, so please try it out and let us know what you think!
I used Sculptor to build most of https://lingolog.app/ (featured in this post).
It was a blast - I was cooking dinner and blasting out features, coming back to see what Sculptor had cooked up for me in the meantime. I also painted the landing page in procreate while Sculptor was whirring away.
Of course, this meant that my time shifted from producing code to reviewing code. I found the diffs, Sculptor's internal to-do list, and summaries all helpful to this end.
n.b. I'm not affiliated with the team, but I've worked with some Imbue team members many years ago which led to being a beta tester.
Although, Sculptor does not use work trees, but that is an implementation detail.
We've also shipped "suggestions" under beta (think CI pipelines for your parallel agents) which might feel a little different. The idea is to use LLMs and your regular coding tools (pytest, pyre, ...) to verify that the code produced by the agents is actually correct.
I really hope there is planned support for other coding agents too, in particular OpenCode which seems to have relatively close feature parity coupled with wide model compatibility and open source.
Eventually what we want is for the whole thing to be open -- Sculptor, the coding agent, the underlying language model, etc.
In general I'm not even sure if the extra cognitive overload of agent multiplexing would save me time in the long run. I think I still prefer to work on one task at a time for the sake of quality and thoroughness.
However the feature I was most looking forward to is a mobile integration to check the agent status while away from keyboard, from my phone.
> What if my application is not dockerized?
Then claude runs in a container created from our default image, and any code it executes will run in that container as well.
> Can Claude Code execute tests by itself in the context of the container when not paired?
Yup! It can do whatever you tell it. The "pairing" is purely optional -- it's just there in case you want to directly edit the agent's code from your IDE.
> Do they all share the same database?
We support custom docker containers, so you should be able to configure it however you want (eg, to have separate databases, or to share a database, depending on what you want)
> Running full containerized applications with many versions of Postgres at the same time sounds very heavy for a dev laptop
Yeah -- it's not quite as bad if you run a single containerized Postgres and they each connect to a different database within that instance, but it's still a good point.
One of the features on our roadmap (that I'm very excited about) is the ability to use fully remote containers (which definitely gets rid of this "heaviness", though it can get a bit expensive if you're not careful)
> the feature I was most looking forward to is a mobile integration to check the agent status while away from keyboard, from my phone.
That's definitely on the roadmap!
under sculptor, claude code CAN execute tests by itself when not paired. that will also work for non-dockerized applications.
sharing a postgres across containers may require a bit of manual tweaking, but we support the devcontainer spec, so if you can configure e.g. your network appropriately that way, you can use a shared database as you like!
regarding multiplexing: the cognitive overhead is real. we are investigating mechanisms for reducing it. more on that later.
regarding mobile integration: we also want that! more on that later.
Ok, and then what? Honest question.
Someday we'll probably have paid plans and business / enterprise licenses available as well, but our focus right now is on making it really useful for people.
To me, the whole point of our company is to make these kinds of systems more open, understandable, and modifiable, so at least as long as I'm here, that's what we'll be doing :)
"VibeKit is a safety layer for your coding agent. Run Claude Code, Gemini, Codex — or any coding agent — in a clean, isolated sandbox with sensitive data redaction and observability baked in."
https://docs.vibekit.sh/cli
Our approach is a bit more custom and deeply integrated with the coding agents (ex: we understand when the turn has finished and can snapshot the docker container, allowing rollbacks, etc)
We do also have a terminal though, so if you really wanted, I suppose you could run any text-based agent in there (although I've never tried that). Maybe we'll add better support for that as a feature someday :)
* containerized, but meets free range standards
This is from our fundraising post 2 years ago:
> Our goal remains the same: to build practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. To do this, we train foundation models optimized for reasoning. Today, we apply our models to develop agents that we can find useful internally, starting with agents that code. Ultimately, we hope to release systems that enable anyone to build robust, custom AI agents that put the productive power of AI at everyone’s fingertips.
- https://imbue.com/company/introducing-imbue/
We have trained a bunch of our own models since then, and are excited to say more about that in the future (but it's not the focus of this release)
Please feel free to join discord if you run into any bugs or have any issues at all, we're happy to help: https://discord.gg/sBAVvHPUTE
Suggestions welcome too!
Containers also unlock a cool agent-switching workflow, Pairing Mode: https://loom.com/share/1b02a925be42431da1721597687f7065
Ultimately, our roadmaps are pretty different — we're focused ways to help you easily verify agent code, so that over time you can trust it more and work at a higher level.
Towards this, today we have a beta feature, Suggestions, that catches issues/bugs/times when Claude lies to you, as you're working. That'll get built out a lot over the next few months.
If you have any specific questions that aren't covered there, please let us know in Discord!
Obviously not the most user friendly or usable, but we found that people often got pretty confused when this was a browser tab instead of a standalone app (it's easy to lose the tab, etc)
I'd give it a good 20% chance of working if you set the right environment variables in there :) Feel free to experiment in the "Terminal" tab as well, you can call claude directly from there to confirm if it works.
Any particular features you'd be looking for when we add support for those models/agents?