If you are using Claude Code on macOS running it in a devcontainer has a few upsides like fewer cli tool call failures, meaning less waiting time and less context window spam.
But there are some things you lose as well @ ergonomics:
- "done" notifications are not working by default (might be possible trigger and send to host using hooks feature)
- more difficult to give playwright a session (need to get cookies into playwright in the container)
- can't easily paste screenshots into the devcontainer (Claude Code has to take a screenshot or you have to put it into a mounted dir)
and of course the usual advantages of using containers still apply (dependency management, reproducibility and so on).
I still wonder though if nix would allow me to remove the container overhead (they do noticeably tax the macbook battery).
Claude Code using grep is often failing (also in devcontainer but less often). Many command line tools on macOS work subtly different than the ones on linux.
But there are some things you lose as well @ ergonomics:
- "done" notifications are not working by default (might be possible trigger and send to host using hooks feature)
- more difficult to give playwright a session (need to get cookies into playwright in the container)
- can't easily paste screenshots into the devcontainer (Claude Code has to take a screenshot or you have to put it into a mounted dir)
and of course the usual advantages of using containers still apply (dependency management, reproducibility and so on).
I still wonder though if nix would allow me to remove the container overhead (they do noticeably tax the macbook battery).