How not to have your hard drive deleted by AI

date

Jan 9, 2026

type

Post

year

slug

ai-container

status

Published

tags

Claude Code

Console

Docker

Linux

Shell

bash

summary

You’ve probably all heard the stories: AI coding tools wreck havoc on users’ machines, delete entire hard drives, then apologise profoundly.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give AI tools access to our command lines and let them do whatever the hell they wanted?

Well, it’s easy to prevent this drama. How? I run my AI agents inside a docker container! It’s not even inconvenient, because I have a volume mounted into a folder on my Mac. That’s the only point of contact. The AI agent can’t touch or run anything on my computer, but the project files still end up in that one special folder on my drive for easy testing.

I made a shell script that starts everything up for me - I just run ./ai-sandbox.sh start and a docker image builds, installs everything I need and connects me the shell inside the docker container!

It doesn’t look any different from using Claude Code (or anything else) directly in the terminal. Except here I don’t need to worry about anything. If it messes up the system in the container, I just run ./ai-sandbox.sh rebuild and it’s ready to go again!

If I want to work on multiple things at once, I just open a new Terminal window and run ./ai-sandbox.sh shell and it connects me to another shell instance inside the container!

I shared this little project ⬇️ on GitHub here, so feel free to use and mod to your liking. All you really need is Docker Desktop installed.