Snail
snail — "a snail always carries its home, a shell, on its back" — is the fleet's container-based sandboxing environment for AI code agents. Provides isolated, reproducible execution environments with session management across Docker and Kubernetes backends.
Stack: Go. Private repo.
Integrates with an orchestration system (core) to spawn containers for autonomous AI tasks.
Presets
| Preset | Description |
|---|---|
default |
Full dev environment with dotfiles, nvim, tmux, oh-my-posh |
vanilla |
Languages + tools without personal dotfiles |
builder |
Minimal: essentials, dotfiles, python, nodejs, docker |
hooks |
Default + Signal CLI + message hooks for Claude Code |
signal |
Default + Signal CLI + signal-mcp for MCP-based messaging |
llamafactory |
Vanilla + LLaMA-Factory |
dev-gpu |
GPU-enabled dev environment, batteries included |
dev-builder |
Docker-in-Docker dev environment, batteries included |
dev-web |
Frontend dev environment with Playwright MCP, browser-use, DinD |
Profiles
Profiles at ~/.config/snail/profiles/ define session configurations, including which repos to clone. The dev profiles use dynamic repo discovery — SNAIL_DEV_REPOS_ORG / SNAIL_DEV_REPOS_USER environment variables clone all unarchived repos via the GitHub API.
snail run dev-gpu:my-session
snail run dev-builder:my-session
snail run dev-web:my-session
Secrets (Signal phone number, etc.) live separately in ~/.config/snail/secrets.yaml.
Volume mounts
Session volume mounts to /home/me. Anthropic config (~/.anthropic), a shared cache volume, and a models directory ($MODELS or ~/.cache/huggingface) are also automounted.
Sources
See also
- core — orchestration system that spawns snail containers.
- unleash — agent CLI runner inside the sandbox.
- signal-integration — Signal CLI + MCP for the
signalpreset.