Solomon Hykes

Solomon Hykes is Docker’s creator and a co-founder of Dagger. At the 2025 AI Engineer World’s Fair, he launched Dagger’s open-source Container Use in his Containing Agent Chaos keynote, introducing containerized environments for coding agents.[4][2]

Hykes’s talk abstract argues that reliable agent systems require work outside the model: reproducible execution workflows. He proposes applying containerization to each individual workflow step, rather than only to deployment, to provide isolation and environmental consistency. Combined with immutable state management, he argues, this approach makes testing and debugging more tractable.[4]

Container Use is a Dagger-powered open-source MCP server used through a command-line tool with Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible agents. Its documented approach gives each agent a fresh container and its own Git branch. Command histories and logs expose its actions; developers can enter its terminal to intervene and check out its branch to review the work. The project is described as being in early development.[5]

In January 2026, Hykes made a bounded decision about how Dagger introduced itself. His “Docs: refocus” pull request aligned the documentation introduction with the README and homepage and refocused it on software delivery. He also downgraded the “build an AI agent” quickstart, explaining that “it seems to confuse people.” After reviewer kpenfound approved the changes, Hykes merged the pull request on January 13. The change concerned documentation presentation.[7]

Hykes’s earlier work at Dotcloud and Docker supplies the historical context for his experience with containers. In his March 2018 departure announcement, he traced both the founding team’s container ambitions and his changing responsibilities as the company grew.[6]

In “Au revoir,” dated March 28, 2018, Hykes recalled quitting his job ten years earlier, returning to live with his mother in Paris, and starting Dotcloud with Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl. He became CEO. Their goal, he wrote, was to harness containers to create “tools of mass innovation”: programming tools that anyone could use.[6]

Hykes credited Dotcloud’s reinvention as Docker five years before that announcement to a core team of Eric Bardin, Sam Alba, Jerome Petazzoni, Julien Barbier, and himself. As growth accelerated, the company hired an experienced CEO, and Hykes became CTO.[6]

On March 28, 2018, Hykes announced that he would leave Docker’s day-to-day operations while remaining an active board member and major shareholder. He explained that Docker’s enterprise business needed a CTO alongside CEO Steve Singh with decades of experience shipping and supporting software for large corporations. He described his next role as helping find that successor, offering occasional advice, and getting out of the team’s way. He also planned to spend more time helping entrepreneurs he had advised and invested in.[6]