> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.dabs.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# What is dabs?

> Disposable sandboxes, worktrees, and workspaces you can hand to an AI agent

**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.

## What you can hand an agent

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="A box" icon="box" href="/quickstart">
    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.
  </Card>

  <Card title="A worktree" icon="code-branch" href="/guides/worktrees">
    A fresh git branch cut off HEAD, isolated from your working tree, with a
    built-in review-before-delete workflow.
  </Card>

  <Card title="A snapshot" icon="copy" href="/guides/sources">
    A copy of your project the agent can trash freely — your files are never
    touched.
  </Card>

  <Card title="A recipe" icon="scroll" href="/guides/recipes">
    All of the above, declared once in YAML: image, mounts, environment,
    command. `dabs recipe <name>` does the rest.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## 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.

## Where to start

1. [Quickstart](/quickstart) — boot your first box in three commands.
2. [Concepts](/concepts) — the six words that explain everything else.
3. [Caveats](/caveats) — the sharp edges, honestly listed.

<Note>
  Every terminal screen in this manual was produced by driving dabs in a real
  terminal.
</Note>