Docker’s Founder Builds an Open Source Alternative to Claude Code, Kind Of

Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker, took to X, to share that he may have created an open source alternative to Anthropic’s Claude Code, as a part of Dagger, an open-source runtime for composable workflows.

Claude Code is an agentic coding tool by Anthropic which was launched along with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The tool lives in the terminal and helps developers code faster without requiring any complex setup. It has also helped Anthropic accelerate its internal development process.

With Dagger’s new module system, one can integrate agentic features into an application as modular components. It lets developers use Dagger as a runtime and programming environment for AI agents, mimicking what Claude Code helps you do. 

Hykes emphasised that the system supports any model, and comes baked in with native MCP support (Model Context Protocol).

He shared examples on X to show how it works. He started by showing how the tool helped create a Kubernetes cluster with the help of OpenAI’s GPT-4o module by just typing in ‘please start a kubernetes cluster for me’

— Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) March 7, 2025

Considering GenAI is fueling demand for Kubernetes, this can help developers speed things up.

He also demonstrated how the tool helped perform issue triage by taking GitHub credentials from the terminal, and installing GitHub CLI (Command Line Interface), all step-by-step.

"here's a container with github credentials. help me do issue triage. you'll need to install the github cli. figure it out" https://t.co/3o9tPMmhLs pic.twitter.com/pHQ9TgCEIZ

— Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre) March 7, 2025

Hykes said that it has been tested with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Llama.

Currently, the project is in active development and can be found on GitHub using an Apache-2.0 license. 

The documentation mentions that its benefits include reproducible execution, end-to-end observability, multi-model support, rapid interaction, and easy integration. One can also find several example repositories that have used Dagger modules with agentic capabilities.