About sand

sand is a small Go CLI and terminal UI that manages disposable Claude Code development VMs on top of Lima. Run it with no arguments for an interactive board of your VMs, or drive it headlessly (sand create, sand shell) from scripts and CI.

Each VM is a fresh, isolated Debian environment with a specific, opinionated stack baked in: Claude Code, common dev tools, and your git identity. You get a disposable place to point an agent at a repository without touching your host machine, and you throw the VM away — or recreate it — when you're done.

What it is not

sand is not a general-purpose VM manager. It doesn't manage arbitrary guest OSes, arbitrary provisioning recipes, or long-lived infrastructure. It manages one kind of thing — a Claude Code development VM — well, and leaves everything else to Lima and limactl directly.

sand is the Go successor to what used to be a shell script plus a standalone Ansible playbook.

Where to go next

• Installation — install sand and its one prerequisite.
• Your First VM — the 30-second path to a running VM.
• How Provisioning Works — the base-image/clone/finalize model that makes each VM fast to create.