Docker founder launches Dagger: Open Source Tools Against Claude Code

Docker founder Solomon Hykes announced on social media platform X that he may have developed an open source alternative to combat Anthropic's Claude Code. This new tool is part of Dagger, an open source runtime environment for combining workflows.

Claude Code is an intelligent encoding tool launched by Anthropic, released with Claude3.7Sonnet. The tool is integrated in the terminal and is designed to help developers write code faster without complex setup. In addition, Claude Code also helped Anthropic speed up the internal development process.

Dagger's new module system allows developers to integrate intelligent features into applications as module components. Developers can use Dagger as the runtime and programming environment for AI agents, a feature that is very similar to Claude Code.

Hex emphasized that the system supports any model and has built-in native model context protocol (MCP) support. He shared some examples on the X platform, demonstrating the power of Dagger. For example, he showed how to create a Kubernetes cluster by simply typing "Please start a Kubernetes cluster for me", leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4o module.

Given that generative AI drives the need for Kubernetes, this tool can undoubtedly help developers accelerate the development process. In addition, Hex also demonstrated how to use this tool to classify problems, obtain GitHub credentials through the terminal, and gradually install the GitHub command line interface (CLI).

According to Hex, the project is currently under active development and has been released on GitHub with an Apache-2.0 license. The documentation mentions that the advantages of Dagger include repeatability, end-to-end observability, multi-model support, fast interaction, and simple integration. Users can also find multiple sample code bases that use Dagger modules and smart features.

Project: https://github.com/dagger/dagger