Yet another Hacker News

Docker Agent

90 points saikatsg 2 hours ago 35 comments

blakeashleyjr 2 hours ago | parent

While I love new open source dev (especially in Go!), agent harnesses are turning into JS frameworks from yesteryear.

All the cool kids have one!

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

Coupled with VSCode forks to manage them

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

Go doesn't have a good mod/plugin story for harness devs to provide to their users

I say this as a gopher who also has a custom harness written in Go, it's a real challenge compared to the TS setups, but TS plugins are also a security concern

gandreani 8 minutes ago | parent

I agree! Comes with the territory of a compiled language I suppose?

I haven't given this much thought (I also just started with golang last year) but I'm assuming the only real path here is to provide extension SDKs in Lua or other languages whose interpreters have been implemented in go.

I think that's what grafana's k6 [1] does with a JS interpreter

[1] https://github.com/grafana/k6

mplewis 1 hour ago | parent

What does this have to do with Docker?

redleader55 1 hour ago | parent

The quest for staying relevant.

speedgoose 1 hour ago | parent

I guess people at Docker wanted to make an agent.

Having it docker branded, I could understand. It’s confusing but the docker brand is strong.

But exposing it as a docker subcommand is very confusing to me.

binsquare 1 hour ago | parent

It reads to me like chasing trends

throwitaway222 1 hour ago | parent

That's the economy we've always been in. X is popular, if your company doesn't have a solution for X you're irrelevant.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

the tools and features certainly indicate so

sleepybrett 27 minutes ago | parent

that's all docker has been doing for years.

dgageot 43 minutes ago | parent

You don't really have to use the docker agent sub-command. docker-agent is a standalone binary. When it was created, though, 1.5 year ago, the idea was that it would be the docker compose for agents (original name was cagent, compose for agents).

But it evolved differently and although it runs very well in docker containers and docker sandboxes, it also runs very well anywhere else.

bmacho 1 hour ago | parent

Based on the repo short description and the first sentence of the readme:

It is called 'Docker' as the company, and it has nothing to do with the container technology.

esafak 48 minutes ago | parent

It's the Docker you know and love... with AI!

McScrooge 1 hour ago | parent

https://docker.github.io/docker-agent/configuration/sandbox/

If, like me, you couldn't find any security-related info on the linked page.

ShinyLeftPad 50 minutes ago | parent

i remember going through the entire docs of docker sandbox and there was not one mention of attack vectors. did they fix that?

mococa 1 hour ago | parent

Pretty vague

tamimio 1 hour ago | parent

>What it is, what it isn’t

Yep, open ai sol model wrote that.

lukemercado 1 hour ago | parent

It frustrates me that there's a prisoners dilemma in communicating this to other humans. If I flag it and write it out (as you've done) I've let the author know that they're losing trust and let others know that they should be more skeptical. I've also created the perfect eval data pair for the ai labs. It's deeply frustrating.

baby_souffle 28 minutes ago | parent

I think the cat is out of the bag.

There was a brief point in time at the beginning of the internet where if you saw an image online you could be kind of confident that it hadn't been manipulated significantly... But somewhere around the mid to late 2000s it became prudent to just assume any image you've seen online got at least a blemish filter pass through something like Photoshop.

Same thing now with written text. Sometimes you'll be a little bit more or less sure than an llm produced the output but never able to say 100% confidently.

cyanydeez 24 minutes ago | parent

AI is going to eradicate, for good, all trust in the Internet.

That's a benified "not a drawback".

IncreasePosts 1 hour ago | parent

Your probably spare yourself some RSI by inverting this and only writing out a message when you find human generated content on hn

maxdo 1 hour ago | parent

they hope they can annoy and email every person in the org asking for money , same way as they did it with docker.

looks like a weird abstractions. why do i need this if i have modal.com, e2b, cloudflare that use original docker + some toolings around + way to run + isolations on network level.

sergiotapia 1 hour ago | parent

very weird. why does this have dockers name on it? might as well use an agent harness from kohl's or steak n' shake. odd..

dgageot 38 minutes ago | parent

It was created to be the docker compose for agents. 2 years ago, people, including ourselves, started to mix agentic loops and non agentic components in docker compose files. We created docker agent to make this more powerful.

At the end, the link with docker compose is just the yaml form. Which by the way can be replaced with hcl files or Go code.

beckford 1 hour ago | parent

Docker Agent could be beneficial for research studies. For example, while writing a ML paper about agents I need to rerun experiments so that: - others can repeat my results - validate that variability from LLMs is not causing overconfidence in the results

But currently uv is good enough to create isolated, repeatable environments. And it isn't limited to Linux like standard Docker. So when I want to test small samples on my local PC's GPU (Windows or mac) before running on beefier hardware, I can do that easily.

rfgplk 1 hour ago | parent

> Go

Nowadays there are only two justifiable public languages you should be using for anything a) C++ b) Rust

Rust itself is dubious due to abysmal compile times and the fact that the only guarantees it gives you are of security (aka a skill issue). Modern LLMs write C++ that is as safe if not safer than Rust. Any other language choice is objectively wrong.

* For those inquisitive enough the keyword "public" is doing all the heavy lifting here. Pretty much everyone should be developing and using an in-house DSL at this point.

furyofantares 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah well I'm doing everything in AssemblyScript.

esafak 50 minutes ago | parent

What's new or interesting here? Docker's AI story ought to be around sandboxing, yet the word appears nowhere. Oh, and it's YAML, which I despise.

dgageot 41 minutes ago | parent

Docker Agent predates Docker sandboxes. It was created almost two years ago when not everybody had a AI harness. Nowadays, it does run very well in Docker Sandboxes but it runs also very well anywhere you like.

CBLT 11 minutes ago | parent

I tried really hard to make this work for me a couple of weeks ago but it was the bittlest harness out of any that I've used. I'd come back when it's more mature.

dgageot 8 minutes ago | parent

Would love to know what didn't work for you

throwrioawfo 10 minutes ago | parent

gimmick