I wrote an MCP Server (called Codebox[1]) which starts a Docker container with your project code mounted. It works quite well, and I've been using it with LibreChat and vscode. In my experience, Agents save 2x the time (over using an LLM traditionally) and is less typing, but at roughly 3x the cost.
The idea is to make the entire Unix toolset available to the LLM (such as ls, find), along with project specific tooling (such as typescript, linters, treesitter). Basically you can load whatever you want into the container, and let the LLM work on your project inside it. This can be done with a VM as well.
I've found this workflow (agentic, driven through a Chat based interface) to be more effective compared to something like Cursor. Will do a Show HN some time next week.