Your coding agent is bad at Docker, and it isn't the agent's fault
I let a coding agent run my local stack for a few months. It writes the compose file, brings the services up, reads the logs, fixes the bug, and checks the fix worked. It's good at most of that. Docker is where it struggles every time, and after a while I stopped blaming the model. The problem is Docker's interface, which was designed for a person sitting at a terminal. That person can open a…
A coding agent struggled with Docker due to its interface, which was designed for human use on a terminal. The agent was good at most tasks but struggled with Docker every time. There were five specific issues that caused the agent difficulties, including port allocation errors, difficulty distinguishing between running and unresponsive services, excessive log data, lack of container cleanup, and the inability to distinguish between agent-created and other containers.
The author provided workarounds for each of these issues, including using lsof to identify who is using a port, allowing only specific Docker commands, using log redirection and grep for log analysis, setting up readiness checks with time limits, and using labels for container cleanup. These workarounds helped reduce the number of wasted turns and improve the agent's performance.
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