{"slug": "dagger", "name": "Dagger", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 8, "warners": 0, "score": 4.081, "rising": 2.67, "first": "2025-12-14", "latest": "2026-10-24", "why": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 6, "neutral": 4, "compare": 3, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 3], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers", "icon": true, "domain": "dagger.io", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://dagger.io", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Dagger"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 803577360, "item_id": 50223585, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223585", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers", "excerpt": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers - Container based workflows are the same in CI and locally (you can run containers too), they become one-liners - Remote caching out of the box without extra steps - Multiple language SDKs, unlocks the DAG in BuildKit and containers, real reuse - Obfuscates secrets from your logs and agents. I've built an agent environment on Dagger, which also includes forki", "context": "", "use_case": "CI container workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab"}, {"id": 803290848, "item_id": 50205678, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205678", "by": "avsm", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)", "excerpt": "I am having a blast working on environmental science these days, and we\u2019re long overdue a beer next in SF! Am firing up Dagger to give it a try on our geospatial workflows for the first time just now; it\u2019s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)", "context": "works on environmental science", "use_case": "geospatial workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker is weird"}, {"id": 801992833, "item_id": 50124552, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50124552", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "replace my harness builtin tools with Dagger based implementation", "excerpt": "We use GoModel for the gateway and visibility Sandboxing is less mature, but we use containers for our agents in CI. I personally (1) run them in k8s (2) replace my harness builtin tools with Dagger based implementation If an agent can delete a production database, that's PEBKAC imo. Our agents do not have access to such things. tl;dr - the solution is to shift-left to deterministic prevention, not stochastic detecti", "context": "", "use_case": "sandboxing agent tools", "switched_from": "", "story": "LLM says something, my tool track if it followed its promise on tools"}, {"id": 798946816, "item_id": 49934176, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934176", "by": "thinkxl", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm a happy Dagger user. I use it heavily for GitOps", "excerpt": "I'm a happy Dagger user. I use it heavily for GitOps, but I never thought to use it like this. Definitely joining the Discord server.", "context": "", "use_case": "GitOps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pi Durable"}, {"id": 792945888, "item_id": 49559118, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559118", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-09-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used dagger for the sandbox in my personal harness.", "excerpt": "I used dagger for the sandbox in my personal harness. Docker also has a sandbox (microvm based) product now. Both obscure the credentials, but I do not think it eliminates them base64 encoding it (or some other transformation). It does step it from being visible if it is the same string, regardless where/how it is printed. Service accounts / IAM / WIF / proxies, which remove credentials from the environment all toget", "context": "", "use_case": "sandbox for coding agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you gate an autonomous coding agent's shell access?"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "avsm", "context": "works on environmental science", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205678", "date": "2026-10-23"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["ci", "ci container workflows", "geospatial workflows", "sandboxing agent tools", "gitops", "multi-language pipelines"], "compared": [{"slug": "docker", "name": "Docker", "co": 5, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "google-adk", "name": "Google ADK", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "cue", "name": "CUE", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "docker-compose", "name": "Docker Compose", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "opencode", "name": "OpenCode", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 803263984, "item_id": 50203999, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50203999", "by": "shykes", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So increasingly I find myself using Dagger instead of Docker, in the context of my CI pipelines.", "excerpt": "Thank you for sharing that! Yes, I still use Docker. Although my way of using it has changed over time, like many others I assume. My new project, Dagger, although it doesn't directly compete with Docker, does implement its own container runtime and orchestrator (for CI pipelines), and we recently added compatibility with Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files... So increasingly I find myself using Dagger instead of Do", "context": "creator of Dagger", "use_case": "CI pipelines", "switched_from": "Docker", "story": "Docker is weird"}, {"id": 745921456, "item_id": 46620091, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620091", "by": "shykes", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we are rolling back this messaging and refocusing on CI/CD again", "excerpt": "> got confused by the AI sections... You're not the only one... At some point last year, we discovered that CI/CD workflows and so-called \"AI agent workflows\" have a lot in common, and Dagger can in theory be used as an execution engine for both. We attempted to explain this - \"great for CI/CD and for Agents!\". But the feedback was mostly negative - it came across as confusing and lacking focus. So, we are rolling ba", "context": "Dagger team member", "use_case": "CI/CD workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202681", "title": "Docker is weird", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50222622", "title": "Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122209", "title": "LLM says something, my tool track if it followed its promise on tools", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49925969", "title": "Pi Durable", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49839567", "title": "Evolving programming languages in the AI era", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556858", "title": "Ask HN: How do you gate an autonomous coding agent's shell access?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"compare": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1, "compare": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803581922, "item_id": 50223870, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223870", "by": "0xbadcafebee", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines", "excerpt": "I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines, so some people might have issues moving to it. I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer", "context": "", "use_case": "CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab"}, {"id": 803577360, "item_id": 50223585, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223585", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers", "excerpt": "Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers - Container based workflows are the same in CI and locally (you can run containers too), they become one-liners - Remote caching out of the box without extra steps - Multiple language SDKs, unlocks the DAG in BuildKit and containers, real reuse - Obfuscates secrets from your logs and agents. I've built an agent environment on Dagger, which also includes forki", "context": "", "use_case": "CI container workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab"}, {"id": 803290848, "item_id": 50205678, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50205678", "by": "avsm", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it\u2019s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)", "excerpt": "I am having a blast working on environmental science these days, and we\u2019re long overdue a beer next in SF! Am firing up Dagger to give it a try on our geospatial workflows for the first time just now; it\u2019s got the same attention to CLI detail as Docker 1.0 did :-)", "context": "works on environmental science", "use_case": "geospatial workflows", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker is weird"}, {"id": 803276384, "item_id": 50204774, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50204774", "by": "davnicwil", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'll check out Dagger, sounds interesting.", "excerpt": "I'll check out Dagger, sounds interesting. Yeah I've really been enjoying using AI to write docker/compose config and related ad hoc scripts. It was all pretty understandable anyway, but now you can just set up whatever you can think of in literally minutes, even if you just want a particular configuration as a one off. It's a great era for devops!", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker is weird"}, {"id": 801992833, "item_id": 50124552, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50124552", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "replace my harness builtin tools with Dagger based implementation", "excerpt": "We use GoModel for the gateway and visibility Sandboxing is less mature, but we use containers for our agents in CI. I personally (1) run them in k8s (2) replace my harness builtin tools with Dagger based implementation If an agent can delete a production database, that's PEBKAC imo. Our agents do not have access to such things. tl;dr - the solution is to shift-left to deterministic prevention, not stochastic detecti", "context": "", "use_case": "sandboxing agent tools", "switched_from": "", "story": "LLM says something, my tool track if it followed its promise on tools"}, {"id": 798946816, "item_id": 49934176, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934176", "by": "thinkxl", "date": "2026-10-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'm a happy Dagger user. I use it heavily for GitOps", "excerpt": "I'm a happy Dagger user. I use it heavily for GitOps, but I never thought to use it like this. Definitely joining the Discord server.", "context": "", "use_case": "GitOps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Pi Durable"}, {"id": 797792977, "item_id": 49862061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862061", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-09-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "here are two I use", "excerpt": "maybe more like an ecosystem around a framework implemented in multiple language SDKs, here are two I use https://adk.dev/ https://docs.dagger.io/reference/sdks both can invoke modules written in other languages from your language of choice Kubernetes is likely an interesting ecosystem to consider under this lens too", "context": "", "use_case": "multi-language pipelines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Evolving programming languages in the AI era"}, {"id": 792945888, "item_id": 49559118, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559118", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-09-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used dagger for the sandbox in my personal harness.", "excerpt": "I used dagger for the sandbox in my personal harness. Docker also has a sandbox (microvm based) product now. Both obscure the credentials, but I do not think it eliminates them base64 encoding it (or some other transformation). It does step it from being visible if it is the same string, regardless where/how it is printed. Service accounts / IAM / WIF / proxies, which remove credentials from the environment all toget", "context": "", "use_case": "sandbox for coding agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How do you gate an autonomous coding agent's shell access?"}, {"id": 779800066, "item_id": 48737504, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737504", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-06-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used ADK, Dagger, and a VS Code extension for mine.", "excerpt": "Lots of ways, it's a good exercise that you will learn a lot doing. Might make you cynical w.r.t. big ai harnesses I used ADK, Dagger, and a VS Code extension for mine. Currently using opencode though.", "context": "", "use_case": "building personal harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Code Is Steganographically Marking Requests"}, {"id": 777324002, "item_id": 48582750, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582750", "by": "OhSoHumble", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Dagger.io is in there somewhere to make local CI mirror what happens in the action runner.", "excerpt": "I personally just self-host. The project that I'm working on right now uses Gitea internally with an action runner. I use Digital Ocean and run a Nomad cluster on top of that. Gitea and its action runner builds container images and then pushes nomad job definitions to the cluster. I have zero downtime deployment and rolling deploys. Dagger.io is in there somewhere to make local CI mirror what happens in the action ru", "context": "", "use_case": "local CI parity", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Forge We Deserve"}, {"id": 775187842, "item_id": 48449240, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48449240", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "A custom harness backed by dagger", "excerpt": "A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box) Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards m", "context": "", "use_case": "agent harness backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 766410112, "item_id": 47900632, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47900632", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-04-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've been using a similar setup, but based on Dagger.", "excerpt": "I've been using a similar setup, but based on Dagger. I don't have it as a proper dev container (yet), but I get a lot of the vscode benefits by presenting it as a virtual filesystem and terminal. I can make fully custom envs that myself or my agents can use, we can even share the same ones and see each others changes.", "context": "", "use_case": "custom dev environments for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: MicroVM setup for VS Code Dev Container-like experience?"}, {"id": 762028368, "item_id": 47626773, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626773", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-04-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it is a better way (imo) to define, build, and run containers and containerized workflows (not at scale).", "excerpt": "The Dagger TUI is pretty sweet. They have an awesome renderer for OTEL spans (how they emit and view the steps). Built on the Charm suite, it is a better way (imo) to define, build, and run containers and containerized workflows (not at scale). I back my agents and sessions with it for superpowers beyond sandboxing. My personal CLI/TUI is https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof and starts from a CUE centric developer ex", "context": "", "use_case": "containerized workflows, agent sessions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Which CLI tools do you use daily?"}, {"id": 761637745, "item_id": 47602359, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602359", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-04-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "They are central to my personal dev tool", "excerpt": "CUE and Dagger, though they are talked about by more than nobody They are central to my personal dev tool https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof", "context": "", "use_case": "personal dev tool", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?"}, {"id": 757048016, "item_id": 47315501, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47315501", "by": "stavros", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "compare", "quote": "What did you think of Dagger?", "excerpt": "What did you think of Dagger? I used Earthly a while ago but the one thing I didn't like was that it couldn't parallelize runs, since it only ran on one CI instance. Other than that, I liked that I could run my entire CI pipeline locally, but didn't like it so much that I ended up using it for much else.", "context": "", "use_case": "CI pipelines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Things I've Done with AI"}, {"id": 752846770, "item_id": 47052923, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052923", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-02-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "My stack is built on ADK-go, CUE, Dagger, VSCode, and system prompts derived from Claude Code", "excerpt": "I fully support more people building out custom agent stacks. Let's not have Big Ai define how we use this once-in-history advancement. My stack is built on ADK-go, CUE, Dagger, VSCode, and system prompts derived from Claude Code", "context": "", "use_case": "custom agent stack", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm going to build my own OpenClaw, with blackjack and bun"}, {"id": 750445728, "item_id": 46902858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902858", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-02-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use containers via Dagger", "excerpt": "> Docker is too heavy for per-session Why do you believe this to be true? I don't agree, I use containers via Dagger > Full network access Not really a sandbox if the agent can make POST or GET requests to exfiltrate", "context": "", "use_case": "containerized per-session environments", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: AgentVM \u2013 Safe, Sandboxed Linux VM for OpenClaw and AI Agents"}, {"id": 750000864, "item_id": 46875054, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875054", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Dagger has a similar feature", "excerpt": "Dagger has a similar feature: https://docs.dagger.io/getting-started/types/secret/ Same idea with more languages on OCI. I believe they have something even better in the works, that bundles a bunch of things you want in an \"env\" and lets you pass that around as a single \"pointer\" I use this here, which eventually becomes the sandbox my agent operates in: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_next/.veg/containers", "context": "", "use_case": "secret handling in agent sandboxes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Deno Sandbox"}, {"id": 749472400, "item_id": 46842025, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46842025", "by": "verdverm", "date": "2026-01-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I solved this with Dagger and OCI layers, so I get all these same features while also doing so in an isolated environment", "excerpt": "I solved this with Dagger and OCI layers, so I get all these same features while also doing so in an isolated environment in a ubiquitous format. The ADK framework I use does most of the rest Not a prod time thing, unless you consider a coding agent using this as prod, because it's the real thing at development time", "context": "", "use_case": "replaying coding agent runs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: I built a small OSS kernel for replaying and diffing AI decisions"}, {"id": 740225872, "item_id": 46264117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264117", "by": "stephen", "date": "2025-12-14", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I thought Dagger had/has a lot of potential to be \"AWS-CDK for CI pipelines\".", "excerpt": "I thought Dagger had/has a lot of potential to be \"AWS-CDK for CI pipelines\". I.e. declaratively setup a web of CI / deployment tasks, based on docker, with a code-first DSL, instead of the morass of copy-pasted (and yes orbs) CircleCI yaml files we have strewn about our internals repos. But their DSL for defining your pipelines is ... golang? Like who would pick golang as \"a friendly language for setting up configs\"", "context": "", "use_case": "CI/CD pipeline definition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Dagger: Define software delivery workflows and dev environments"}]}