[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sculptor, the Missing UI for Claude Code
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Show HN: Sculptor, the Missing UI for Claude Code
Hey, I'm Josh, cofounder of Imbue. We built Sculptor because we
wanted a great UI for parallel coding agents. We love Claude Code,
but wanted to solve some of the problems that come from running
multiple agents in parallel (ex: merge conflicts with multiple
agents, reinstalling dependencies with git worktrees, Claude Code
could deleting your home directory, etc). Sculptor is a desktop
app that lets you safely run Claude Code agents by putting them in
separate docker containers. This lets you use Claude without having
to compromise on security or deal with annoying tool permission
prompts. Then you can just tell Claude to keep running the code
until it actually works. To help you easily work with
containerized agents, we created "Pairing Mode": bidirectionally
sync the agent's code into your IDE and test/edit together in real
time. You can also simply pull and push manually if you want. We
have some more cool features planned on our roadmap that are
enabled by this approach, like the ability to "fork" conversations
(and the entire state of the container), or roll back to a previous
state. It's still very early, but we would love your feedback.
Sculptor itself is free to use, so please try it out and let us
know what you think!
Author : thejash
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-09-30 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (imbue.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (imbue.com)
| bfogelman wrote:
| Member of the team here, happy to answer questions. Took a lot of
| ups, downs and work to get here but excited to finally get this
| out. Even more excited to share other features we've been cooking
| behind the scenes. Give it a try and let us know what you think,
| we're hungry for feedback.
| cgarvis wrote:
| Are you doing got worktrees in the backend?
| penlu wrote:
| no sir. only the fullest featured repositories for our free-
| range* claudes
|
| * containerized, but meets free range standards
| bfogelman wrote:
| right now we're using docker -- we're planning to support
| modal (https://modal.com/) for remote sandboxes and a "local"
| mode that might use something like worktrees
| thadd3us wrote:
| Really proud to be a part of this team! And really excited for
| the future of Sculptor -- it has quickly become my favorite
| agentic coding tool because of the way it lets you safely and
| locally execute untrusted LLM code in an agentic loop, using a
| containerized environment that you control!
| micimize wrote:
| Exciting stuff! A big step towards an accelerated AI-assisted SWE
| approach that avoids the trap of turning engineers into AI slop
| janitors
| dalejh wrote:
| Congrats on the launch Imbue team!
|
| I used Sculptor to build most of https://lingolog.app/ (featured
| in this post).
|
| It was a blast - I was cooking dinner and blasting out features,
| coming back to see what Sculptor had cooked up for me in the
| meantime. I also painted the landing page in procreate while
| Sculptor was whirring away.
|
| Of course, this meant that my time shifted from producing code to
| reviewing code. I found the diffs, Sculptor's internal to-do
| list, and summaries all helpful to this end.
|
| n.b. I'm not affiliated with the team, but I've worked with some
| Imbue team members many years ago which led to being a beta
| tester.
| bfogelman wrote:
| lffgggg excited to see where you take lingo log :)
| kanjun wrote:
| I'm _so_ happy to hear this -- your experience was what we
| hoped to enable!
| rsyring wrote:
| > Sculptor is free while we're in beta.
|
| Ok, and then what? Honest question.
| thejash wrote:
| Our current plan is to make the source code available and make
| it free for personal use, but we're not quite ready to open-
| source it.
|
| Someday we'll probably have paid plans and business /
| enterprise licenses available as well, but our focus right now
| is on making it really useful for people.
|
| To me, the whole point of our company is to make these kinds of
| systems more open, understandable, and modifiable, so at least
| as long as I'm here, that's what we'll be doing :)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| If Anthropic doesn't buy you guys out before then. This looks
| a little too nice, I could see them trying to acquihire your
| efforts.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| Its not free though. You pay for it by supplying your email
| address.
| lrobinovitch wrote:
| Been fortunate to get to try out Sculptor in pre-release - it's
| great. Like claude code with task parallelism and history built
| in, all with a clean UI.
| warthog wrote:
| Wasn't imbue training models for coding having raised a huge
| fund? Is this a pivot?
| thejash wrote:
| Since our launch 2 years ago, we've focused more on the "agents
| that code" part of our vision (so that everyone can make
| software) rather than the "training models from scratch" part
| (because there were so many good open source models released
| since then)
|
| This is from our fundraising post 2 years ago:
|
| > Our goal remains the same: to build practical AI agents that
| can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real
| world. To do this, we train foundation models optimized for
| reasoning. Today, we apply our models to develop agents that we
| can find useful internally, starting with agents that code.
| Ultimately, we hope to release systems that enable anyone to
| build robust, custom AI agents that put the productive power of
| AI at everyone's fingertips.
|
| - https://imbue.com/company/introducing-imbue/
|
| We have trained a bunch of our own models since then, and are
| excited to say more about that in the future (but it's not the
| focus of this release)
| ajanuary wrote:
| Unfortunately the page repeatedly crashed and reloads on my
| iPhone 13 mini until it gives up.
| kanjun wrote:
| That's super strange -- would you mind trying again on a
| different device? We can't repro. Appreciate your trying!
| HellsMaddy wrote:
| I'm also unable to load it in chrome on linux (wayland
| backend). Seems like some sort of GPU issue.
| MitziMoto wrote:
| Same. Chrome on Manjaro with Wayland, just crashes.
| bfogelman wrote:
| hmm not ideal -- will try and take a look and see whats
| going wrong
| penlu wrote:
| more info on setup, if you can: are you using a non-intel
| GPU for rendering?
| jMyles wrote:
| So... are we all just working on various ways of using Claude
| Code in docker with git worktrees? Is that like, the whole
| world's project this month? :-)
| nvader wrote:
| Seems like an important project to unlock a whole amount of
| productivity.
|
| Although, Sculptor does not use work trees, but that is an
| implementation detail.
| manojlds wrote:
| It's the new TODO app. Anthropic are just going to build one or
| acquire one of these soon and the rest will be dead.
| bfogelman wrote:
| haha honestly a little bit ya. One key thing we've learned from
| working on this is that lowering the barrier to working in
| parallel is key. Making it easy to merge, context switching,
| etc are all important as you try to parallelize things. I'm
| pretty excited about "pairing mode" for this reason as it
| mirrors an agents branch locally so you can make your own edits
| quickly and test changes.
|
| We've also shipped "suggestions" under beta (think CI pipelines
| for your parallel agents) which might feel a little different.
| The idea is to use LLMs and your regular coding tools (pytest,
| pyre, ...) to verify that the code produced by the agents is
| actually correct.
| meowface wrote:
| Looks good. Does the app have a dark theme option?
| lauren-ipsum wrote:
| sure does :)
| kveykva wrote:
| Even design wise this looks virtually identical to
| https://terragonlabs.com/
| itchytoo wrote:
| Imbue team member here. The biggest difference between Sculptor
| and Terragon is the collaboration model. With Terragon, the
| agent outputs PRs. This works well for simple tasks that agents
| can one-shot, but is a bit clunky to use for more complex tasks
| that require closer human-agent collaboration imo. On the other
| hand, Sculptor is designed for local collaboration. Our agents
| run in containers too, but we let you (bidirectionally) sync to
| the containers, which lets you stream in the agent's
| uncommitted changes, and collaborate in real time. So
| basically, it feels like you are using Claude Code locally, but
| you get the safety and parallelism of running Claude in
| containers. I find this much more usable for real world
| engineering tasks!
| mangonomnom wrote:
| got to try this a bit and really liked the UI! It felt very
| transparent and understandable even for someone without a coding
| background
| thejash wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| Please feel free to join discord if you run into any bugs or
| have any issues at all, we're happy to help:
| https://discord.gg/sBAVvHPUTE
|
| Suggestions welcome too!
| myflash13 wrote:
| It's not clear to me what a "container" and "pairing" is in this
| context. What if my application is not dockerized? Can Claude
| Code execute tests by itself in the context of the container when
| not paired? This requires all the dependencies, database, etc. -
| do they all share the same database? Running full containerized
| applications with many versions of Postgres at the same time
| sounds very heavy for a dev laptop. But if you don't isolate the
| database across parallel agents that means you have to worry
| about database conflicts, which sounds nasty.
|
| In general I'm not even sure if the extra cognitive overload of
| agent multiplexing would save me time in the long run. I think I
| still prefer to work on one task at a time for the sake of
| quality and thoroughness.
|
| However the feature I was most looking forward to is a mobile
| integration to check the agent status while away from keyboard,
| from my phone.
| penlu wrote:
| in this context, the container contains the running claude
| instance, and pairing synchronizes its worktree with your local
| worktree.
|
| under sculptor, claude code CAN execute tests by itself when
| not paired. that will also work for non-dockerized
| applications.
|
| sharing a postgres across containers may require a bit of
| manual tweaking, but we support the devcontainer spec, so if
| you can configure e.g. your network appropriately that way, you
| can use a shared database as you like!
|
| regarding multiplexing: the cognitive overhead is real. we are
| investigating mechanisms for reducing it. more on that later.
|
| regarding mobile integration: we also want that! more on that
| later.
| thejash wrote:
| Replying to each piece:
|
| > What if my application is not dockerized?
|
| Then claude runs in a container created from our default image,
| and any code it executes will run in that container as well.
|
| > Can Claude Code execute tests by itself in the context of the
| container when not paired?
|
| Yup! It can do whatever you tell it. The "pairing" is purely
| optional -- it's just there in case you want to directly edit
| the agent's code _from your IDE_.
|
| > Do they all share the same database?
|
| We support custom docker containers, so you should be able to
| configure it however you want (eg, to have separate databases,
| or to share a database, depending on what you want)
|
| > Running full containerized applications with many versions of
| Postgres at the same time sounds very heavy for a dev laptop
|
| Yeah -- it's not quite as bad if you run a single containerized
| Postgres and they each connect to a different database within
| that instance, but it's still a good point.
|
| One of the features on our roadmap (that I'm very excited
| about) is the ability to use fully remote containers (which
| definitely gets rid of this "heaviness", though it can get a
| bit expensive if you're not careful)
|
| > the feature I was most looking forward to is a mobile
| integration to check the agent status while away from keyboard,
| from my phone.
|
| That's definitely on the roadmap!
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| How soon is Sculptor for Mac (Intel) coming? Excited to try it,
| but still hanging on to my last x86 MBP.
| bfogelman wrote:
| Hopefully in the next couple of days! You can join the discord
| and we'll post an announcement when its ready
| https://discord.gg/GvK8MsCVgk
| millanjp wrote:
| This is awesome, I love how it lets claude code "go rogue" safely
| inside a container. I don't like how agents can screw with my
| filesystem so this isolation is good
| cchance wrote:
| Silly question but what about GPT? it feels like with the
| experimental api that most of the clients added for interacting
| the the cli clients it should be possible for something like this
| to run for gpt, claude, or gemini no?
| bfogelman wrote:
| in the works! we want it to be possible to always have the best
| models and agents available
| mentalgear wrote:
| Based on vibekit (open source) ?
|
| "VibeKit is a safety layer for your coding agent. Run Claude
| Code, Gemini, Codex -- or any coding agent -- in a clean,
| isolated sandbox with sensitive data redaction and observability
| baked in."
|
| https://docs.vibekit.sh/cli
| bfogelman wrote:
| nope but vibekit looks interesting -- will take a look
| thejash wrote:
| Nope, not based on vibekit, but it looks like a cool project!
|
| Our approach is a bit more custom and deeply integrated with
| the coding agents (ex: we understand when the turn has finished
| and can snapshot the docker container, allowing rollbacks, etc)
|
| We do also have a terminal though, so if you really wanted, I
| suppose you could run any text-based agent in there (although
| I've never tried that). Maybe we'll add better support for that
| as a feature someday :)
| handfuloflight wrote:
| How does it compare with https://conductor.build/?
| kanjun wrote:
| Great question! Agents in Sculptor run in containers vs.
| locally on your machine, so they can all execute code
| simultaneously (and won't destroy your machine).
|
| Containers also unlock a cool agent-switching workflow, Pairing
| Mode: https://loom.com/share/1b02a925be42431da1721597687f7065
|
| Ultimately, our roadmaps are pretty different -- we're focused
| ways to help you easily verify agent code, so that over time
| you can trust it more and work at a higher level.
|
| Towards this, today we have a beta feature, Suggestions, that
| catches issues/bugs/times when Claude lies to you, as you're
| working. That'll get built out a lot over the next few months.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Excellent, I'll be giving it a go this week! All the best.
| nvader wrote:
| Incidentally, a research preview of Sculptor is what I used to
| build my voice practice app, Vocal Mirror:
| https://danverbraganza.com/tools/vocal-mirror
| kuroko wrote:
| Congrats, looks good! Lacks an option to configure anthropic base
| url though, hope you will add something to configure env
| variables
| bfogelman wrote:
| ooh this is a great idea -- thanks for sharing!
| sawyerjhood wrote:
| Wow this looks just like https://terragonlabs.com
| bfogelman wrote:
| See this comment for some differences:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45428185
| kate_dirky wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Looks awesome
| kate_dirky wrote:
| Congrats! Looks awesome
| abefetterman wrote:
| Looks very cool, congrats on the launch!
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