TypeStandard StageProduction DifficultyModerate JobOnboard developer ForDev teams ForEnterprise IT ForAgencies ServicesSnapshots ServicesContainers ServicesTerminal ServicesFiles Why HoodySnapshot time travel Why HoodyContainer economics

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / hero

SNAPSHOTS · CONTAINER COPY

Onboard a developer with one link

Snapshot your developer baseline once. From then on, every new hire gets one URL. They click it on whatever laptop they have and they're in a fresh container that's a clone of the baseline — codebase, dependencies, env vars, seeded database, VSCode in the browser. Writing code in five minutes. Not setting up.

Read the snapshots docs

#eng-onboarding

Maya Kim · Engineering Leadtoday · 9:02 AM

Welcome aboard! Your dev environment is ready: https://devbox-jordan.hoody.dev. Postgres seeded, repo cloned, just cd ~/work && bun dev.

CLICK OPENS

devbox-jordan.hoody.dev

https://devbox-jordan.hoody.dev/codeREADY

FILES

src/
package.json
bun.lockb
README.md
.env.example
tsconfig.json

TERMINALBUN 1.3

$ bun install Done in 2.3s$ bun dev→ http://localhost:3000

PREVIEWWelcome to acme-internal

LIVE

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / mechanism

How a URL becomes a working laptop

Hoody snapshots capture an entire container — files on disk, the user accounts, the systemd unit files, the seeded database. Container copy clones that snapshot into a fresh container per developer. The link in the email is the route to that fresh container.

POST /api/v1/containers/[baseline_id]/copy4 STEPS · ONE API CALL

Snapshot the baseline once

POST .../snapshots

Take a named snapshot of your reference container — alias it dev-baseline. Re-run when the baseline changes.

Copy on each new hire

POST .../copy [ source_snapshot ]

One API call clones the snapshot into a fresh container under the new developer's project.

Their URL is the container

alex-laptop.containers.hoody.com

The container ships with a public URL out of the gate. Paste it into Slack. They click. They're in.

Terminal, files, browser

ttyd · webview · ssh

hoody_kit lights up the terminal, file browser, and VSCode-in-browser endpoints automatically. Nothing to install on the laptop.

onboard-alex.sh

# 1. Snapshot the baseline (do this once, refresh when you upgrade Node)
curl -X POST "$API/api/v1/containers/$BASE/snapshots" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -d '[ "alias": "dev-baseline" ]'

# 2. Copy the snapshot into a fresh container for the new hire
curl -X POST "$API/api/v1/containers/$BASE/copy" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -d '[
    "target_project_id": "$ACME",
    "name": "alex-laptop",
    "source_snapshot": "dev-baseline",
    "copy_firewall_rules": true,
    "copy_network_rules": true
  ]'

# 3. The response carries the container URL. Email it. That's onboarding.
# => https://alex-laptop.containers.hoody.com

Two POSTs and one URL. The baseline snapshot is the contract; container copy is the constructor; the resulting subdomain is what lands in the welcome email. No bastion to provision, no dotfiles repo to clone, no Docker Desktop license to negotiate.

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / contrast

From a wall of steps to a single sentence

The README that used to ship with every repo carried the failure modes too. Half the lines were workarounds for the laptop the new hire happened to bring. The URL is shorter because the laptop is no longer in the picture — the environment is.

README.md · setup47 STEPS

01Install Xcode CLI tools
02Install Homebrew
03brew install node@20 pnpm postgres@15
04Add PATH lines to .zshrc
05createdb acme_dev
06Clone the seed-data repo
07Run the loader (takes 25 min)
08Ask in #devops for the staging .env
...39 more lines you'll get wrong

AVG TIME TO FIRST COMMITTWO DAYS

BECOMES

the welcome email · v21 LINE

TO: alex@acme.com · SUBJECT: WELCOME

Welcome to the team. Open this when you're ready to write code:

https://alex-laptop.containers.hoody.com

— infra@acme

TIME TO FIRST COMMITFIVE MINUTES

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / dayone

DAY ONE · ALEX'S MONDAY

The README that used to be 47 steps is now one line: open this URL.

08:59 — laptop open, link in clipboard09:04 — first commit pushed

First commit, by the clockFIVE MINUTES · ZERO INSTALLS

0108:59URL lands in the inboxno laptop setup

0209:00Open the URL — already incontainer is the workspace

0309:04First commit pushedwriting code, not configuring

FILESCodebase already cloned, branch on main

DEPSNode, pnpm, Postgres, Redis pre-installed

DATASeed database loaded, staging .env injected

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / replaces

What this replaces

Each of these tries to get a working environment to a new developer's laptop. They each cost setup, license, or DIY glue. A snapshot URL costs none of that — the environment is already running.

GitHub CodespacesPer-seat billing, devcontainer.json to maintain
GitpodPer-workspace pricing, .gitpod.yml to debug
DaytonaSelf-hosted control plane to run
CoderTemplates and provisioner infrastructure to babysit
Devcontainer setupDocker Desktop license + VSCode dance per laptop
Local developmentTwo days of brew, paths, .env requests in #devops
Onboarding docs47 steps that drift the moment someone updates the baseline

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / cta

Stop shipping README setup steps. Ship a URL.

Read the container copy guide

use-cases / onboard-developer-one-link / related

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

One bare-metal box runs dozens to hundreds of Hoody containers. KSM and BTRFS dedup make the marginal cost near zero.

Containers·Snapshots

API endpoints that materialize on demand

A wildcard exec script catches the call, asks an LLM to write the handler, runs it in a V8 sandbox, and saves the route. The next call is native.

Exec·Agent·Code·Files

Branch computers like Git

Snapshot a running container — files, processes, memory. Restore in seconds. Fork via /copy. Branching, but for the entire machine.

Snapshots·Containers

Real VS Code on your phone

The Code Orchestrator spawns a VS Code instance on the container and serves the editor over a normal HTTPS URL. Any device with a browser can open it. The work lives in the container, not on the device.

Display·Terminal·Files·Containers+1

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

A research agent posts to /api/v1/projects/$PID/containers to start a child container, then calls the child's agent URL like any other HTTP service. Sub-agents spawn their own sub-agents the same way. No orchestrator framework, just URLs.

Agent·Exec·Containers

One sandbox per customer, automatically

An exec script catches your signup webhook, copies a fresh-customer container, and hands the new tenant their own URL. Isolation is the operating system, not a tenant_id column.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec·Files

Wake up to a finished prototype

Hand the agent a paragraph at midnight. It spawns its own containers, snapshots before risky steps, and posts to your notification webhook at sunrise.

Agent·Snapshots·Containers·Browser+2

Emergency production fix from your phone

PagerDuty wakes you. Open the terminal URL on your phone. PATCH the snapshot from before the bad deploy. Production is back. No bastion, no VPN, no laptop.

Terminal·Snapshots·Network

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

One pipe URL. Up to 256 readers. Three engineers tail the same incident at once with no bastion, no Datadog seat, no log forwarder.

Pipe

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

The build container streams the tarball to a pipe path with ?n=30. All thirty test workers curl the same URL. Bytes go through once, fanned out.

Pipe

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Your agent runs at home. You're at a café. Pipe each event of the loop through Hoody Pipe and curl the same path from your phone — the trace lands character by character. No SSH, no dashboard, no upload.

Pipe·Agent

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

pg_dump | gzip | curl from Frankfurt. curl | gunzip | psql in Singapore. Bytes flow through the pipe with zero disk in the middle.

Pipe

Send a teammate a database state in one line

pg_dump streams straight into their psql. No file uploaded, no link shared, no download. The pipe routes the bytes through.

Pipe

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

Step 3 streams tokens with curl -T -. Step 4 curls the same path. Tokens move generator to consumer at line speed. No SSE plumbing, no broker.

Pipe·Agent

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

Append ?progress to the pipe URL. Anyone who opens it gets a live HTML dashboard — bytes, speed, ETA, state. Up to fifty spectators, none consuming a receiver slot, none touching the stream.

Pipe

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

Stripe POSTs to a pipe path with ?n=12. Twelve subscribers curl the receiver URL with ?n=12. The pipe holds the event until everyone is connected.

Pipe·Exec

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

tar | zstd | curl puts node_modules into a pipe. Twenty downstream jobs curl | zstd -d | tar x. No S3 bucket, no cache action, no egress bill.

Pipe·Containers

Drag-drop uploads into your script

hoody-pipe serves a web upload form at every path. Drag a file onto the page, your script reads the bytes from stdin. Zero upload code, no S3 bucket, no presigned URLs.

Pipe·Exec

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

ffmpeg streams your screen to a pipe path with ?n=200. Each attendee curls the URL into a browser tab. No platform, no logins, no upload.

Pipe

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Container A writes to a pipe path. Container B reads from the same path. Backpressure is the connection. No Redis, no queue, no broker.

Pipe·Containers

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

The agent streams its trace to a pipe path you can curl from your phone. When it finishes, its last act hits hoody-notifications and your phone buzzes. Two URLs and a buzz — no SDK, no client app, no dashboard.

Pipe·Agent·Notifications

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

ffmpeg captures the mic, pipes to a URL. The other end curls and plays the audio. No Zoom, no SDK, no signaling server.

Pipe

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

A panel of five models reviews the same input. Each runs in its own container and streams its verdict to its own pipe path. A judge process curls all five in parallel and tallies the result.

Pipe·Agent·Containers

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

Snapshot the incident-time logs in hoody-files. Replay them through a Hoody Pipe URL with ?n=8. Eight engineers curl the same path and watch the cascade fire in lockstep — the post-mortem is a synchronized stream, not a Confluence doc.

Pipe·Files

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

A teammate pings for a 4 GB dump. Slack rejects it, Drive needs a share request. You type curl -T file …; they type curl … > file. The bytes move directly between disks — no upload bar, no link to share.

Pipe

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

One GPU runs llama.cpp. Its tokens stream into a pipe path with ?n=50. Fifty containers curl the same URL and split the stream.

Pipe·Daemon

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

Each container's monitoring loop curls a metric to a pipe URL. The dashboard curls the same URL with ?progress and renders the SSE stream.

Pipe

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

POST a managed cron entry with expires_at set 48 hours out. The job runs on schedule, then removes itself — no reminder, no cleanup PR, no stale entry.

Cron

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A hoody-cron entry that fires at 02:55 UTC, curls the snapshots URL, and names the artifact pre-migration-2026-05-04. Five minutes later the migration runs. If it succeeds, the snapshot sits idle and costs nothing. If it fails, you restore in 30 seconds with a single PATCH.

Cron·Snapshots

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Each tenant gets their own container and their own hoody-cron service. Customer A's 9am digest fires on time even when customer B's job hangs for 40 minutes, because they aren't on the same crontab.

Cron·Containers

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

A nightly cron POSTs a spawn request, the agent does its hour of work, then a second cron tears the container down. The agent exists only when there is work for it to do.

Cron·Agent·Containers

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

Raw events pile up in a sqlite URL. Every night a cron entry curls an exec endpoint, the script runs the rollup SQL, writes the daily table back. No DAG, no Airflow Postgres, no scheduler dashboard.

Cron·SQLite·Exec

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

Your repo checks in `.hoody/crontab`. The deploy script PUTs that file to the new container's Cron API. Each branch gets its container, its filesystem, its schedule.

Cron·Containers

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

POST a cron entry with expires_at = shift end. When the shift ends, the entry deletes itself. The next on-call posts their own.

Cron·Notifications

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Three lines in one crontab: hourly browser scrape into SQLite, daily exec digest, weekly archive to files. Flat-rate server, three rhythms, no scheduler service.

Cron·Browser·SQLite·Files

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Customers POST their own 5-field expressions; their crontab lives in their container, isolated. You don't validate against a global queue.

Cron·Containers

Schedule the agent, not the script

A 5-field cron entry curls hoody-agent with a prompt instead of running a fixed script. Today is the last day of the month — the agent figures it out. The data shape changed — the agent figures it out.

Cron·Agent

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Each cron run POSTs a heartbeat to a notifications endpoint. A second cron checks last-heartbeat and pages on silence. Silence is the alert.

Cron·Notifications

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

An hourly cron POSTs a snapshot named with the hour. After 24 hours each new snapshot overwrites yesterday's at the same hour. The 24-floor time machine.

Cron·Snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

You captured 30 minutes of real Stripe traffic into a hoody-files folder. One cron entry replays it against staging at 9am every weekday — same volume, same payloads, same time-of-day pressure.

Cron·Files·Exec

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

Open the cron URL on your phone in the gate area. Tap a row, change a single field of the cron expression, hit Save. PATCH lands. The job fires tonight on the new schedule. No SSH session, no jump box, no laptop.

Cron·Terminal

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Cron at 9am POSTs to an exec script that builds the digest and curls a pipe URL with ?n=200. Two hundred recipients hit the same URL once.

Cron·Exec·Pipe

Mute the flaky job without losing it

PATCH /entries/[id] [ enabled: false ]. The job stays in your crontab waiting to be fixed. No deletion, no rewrite, no lost context.

Cron

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

A nightly cron POSTs to the supervisor agent with yesterday's agent traces from SQLite. The supervisor scores each one. Cron is the supervisor.

Cron·Agent·SQLite

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

The cleanup script checks if there's anything left to clean. When the directory is empty, it DELETEs its own cron entry. Job's done, job's gone.

Cron·Files

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

Cron weekly: POST to an exec script that runs certbot, posts the new cert to the proxy via PATCH. No shell session, no key, no jump host.

Cron·Exec

A weekly canary that tries to break production

Sunday 7am cron wakes a Hoody Agent in a fresh container against a snapshot of prod. It runs the OWASP top twenty, fuzzes the API, and writes a findings report to a URL by 9am. Container retires.

Cron·Agent·Browser·Snapshots

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

Eleven half-finished side projects on Heroku is eleven dynos at $5–7 each. On Hoody it's eleven containers on one $29 bare-metal box. Idle costs zero, the URL wakes the container in milliseconds, and the chess engine nobody uses still runs.

Containers

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Each open PR gets its own clone of a snapshot. The container wakes when reviewers click the link; idle PRs cost nothing.

Containers·Snapshots

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Twelve isolated containers, each its own SaaS, share one $49 bare-metal server — a step above the $29 entry tier, chosen here for the RAM headroom fifty containers want. Per-product margins go from negative to nice.

Containers

Kill the staging-server tax

Stop paying for a duplicate of production. Snapshot the prod container, branch staging from it on demand, freeze it back to disk when nobody's testing. Three environments, one machine, one bill.

Containers·Snapshots

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Each client site lives in its own container; you bill them per-site, you pay the host once. The math finally works for agencies.

Containers·Workspaces

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Your agents stop renting compute by the second from E2B/Modal/Daytona. They use containers on the box you already have.

Containers·Agent·Exec

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Staging used to die because it was expensive to keep around. When idle is free, staging gets to live — even the one a teammate touched 90 days ago.

Containers·Snapshots

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

Eight hundred isolated customers on three bare-metal servers — one flat-rate monthly bill, no per-tenant meter. Each tenant gets a real container with its own kernel namespace, filesystem, and URL. Idle containers cost nothing on top of the server you already pay for.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Cache files live in /files on the box you already rent. Workers PUT and GET tarballs over HTTP. No S3 bucket, no egress, no third vendor — the bytes never leave the box.

Files·Containers

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls

Each prospect gets a real, isolated copy of your product seeded with their data. Cloned from a snapshot. Theirs to keep for a week.

Containers·Snapshots

Onboard a developer with one link

How a URL becomes a working laptop

Snapshot the baseline once

Copy on each new hire

Their URL is the container

Terminal, files, browser

From a wall of steps to a single sentence

What this replaces

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

API endpoints that materialize on demand

Branch computers like Git

Real VS Code on your phone

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

One sandbox per customer, automatically

Wake up to a finished prototype

Emergency production fix from your phone

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Share your screen with a URL, not a meeting invite

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

Send a teammate a database state in one line

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

Drag-drop uploads into your script

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Schedule the agent, not the script

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Mute the flaky job without losing it

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

A weekly canary that tries to break production

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Kill the staging-server tax

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls