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dabs (“dumb agent boxes”) gives a command — or a whole AI agent — a disposable place to work that is not your machine. Its best-known trick is the box: a pristine environment built from an image, which sees only what you explicitly put in it. But dabs has grown past sandboxes: it also cuts git worktrees, snapshots working directories, and keeps a tidy record of every place it provisioned, so nothing an agent produced is ever lost — or left lying around — silently.

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What you can hand an agent

A box

A clean machine over your project. Live-mounted, so the agent’s edits land on your disk — or a throwaway copy, so they don’t.

A worktree

A fresh git branch cut off HEAD, isolated from your working tree, with a built-in review-before-delete workflow.

A snapshot

A copy of your project the agent can trash freely — your files are never touched.

A recipe

All of the above, declared once in YAML: image, mounts, environment, command. dabs recipe <name> does the rest.

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The safety story

Everything destructive in dabs is opt-in, previewed, and confirmed:
  • dabs rm previews what a removal would take, and refuses to proceed without explicit confirmation.
  • A worktree holding unreviewed work cannot be deleted without --force — and dabs shows you the diff first.
  • Data an agent should keep lives in spaces with different lifetimes (volume / held / tmp), each with its own deletion rule.

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Where to start

  1. Quickstart — boot your first box in three commands.
  2. Concepts — the six words that explain everything else.
  3. Caveats — the sharp edges, honestly listed.
Every terminal screen in this manual was produced by driving dabs in a real terminal.