arcbox CLAUDE.md

arcbox CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for coding agents from arcboxlabs/arcbox. It costs 3,168 tokens per session, scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of repository instructions for coding agents working on ArcBox, a Rust project that runs containers and virtual machines on macOS and Linux. It describes the project structure, priorities, and performance goals.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when asking an agent to inspect, modify, or extend the ArcBox codebase. It helps guide decisions about architecture, platform priority, maintainability, and speed.
Why use it?
It gives coding agents the project context and rules they need before making changes, reducing misunderstandings about supported platforms, acceptable changes, and target performance.

Instructions file

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/arcboxlabs/arcbox/claude-md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/arcboxlabs/arcbox

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for arcbox CLAUDE.md

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/arcboxlabs/arcbox/claude-md.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/arcboxlabs/arcbox/claude-md)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/arcboxlabs/arcbox/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/arcboxlabs/arcbox/claude-md.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 3,168 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 3,168 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.03168 $0.03168
Opus 5 $0.01584 $0.01584
Sonnet 5 $0.00634 $0.00634
Haiku 4.5 $0.00317 $0.00317

Measured 4d ago against content hash 9b7c64e47512, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

arcbox CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Repository Guidelines for Coding Agents

Project Overview

ArcBox is a high-performance container and virtual machine runtime in Rust, targeting macOS (primary) and Linux. The goal is to surpass OrbStack on every metric.

The project is in alpha. Breaking changes (internal or user-facing) are acceptable — always prioritize consistency, coherence, and long-term maintainability, even if that means large-scale rewrites.

Performance Targets

Metric Target OrbStack
Cold boot <1.5s ~2s
Warm boot <500ms <1s
Idle memory <150MB¹ ~200MB
Idle CPU <0.05% <0.1%
File I/O ≥100% of the best competitor guest² 75-95% (vs native, their claim)
Network throughput >50 Gbps ~45 Gbps

¹ Host cost is the high-water mark of guest-touched pages, not the configured memory_mb: a fresh idle 16 GB VZ VM measured ~718MB of host phys_footprint (2026-08-01). But no macOS backend reclaims, so that mark is a one-way ratchet — the guest freeing 3GB leaves the host paying for it forever. Only HV can ever release it (VZ guest RAM lives in Apple's XPC process, unreachable by madvise). Evidence in engine/arcbox-engine/src/vm_lifecycle/balloon/mod.rs. ² Same-context comparison (container vs container, same-day pairing). Cache-hot native is not a valid denominator for FUSE metadata — methodology and current numbers in docs/fs-perf-limits.md.

Platform Priority

  1. P0: macOS Apple Silicon
  2. P1: macOS Intel
  3. P2: Linux x86_64/ARM64

Project Structure

  • common/ — shared error types, constants, asset utilities
  • virt/ — Virtualization.framework bindings, cross-platform hypervisor traits, VMM, VirtIO devices, VirtioFS, networking (NAT/DHCP/DNS)
  • rpc/ — protobuf definitions, gRPC services, vsock/unix transport
  • runtime/ — container state, OCI image/runtime
  • engine/ — embeddable, daemon-free engine library (boot assets, machine images, VM/machine lifecycle, agent client; growing per the architecture charter in the company repo)
  • computer/ — agent-computer domain layer: transport-free sandbox protocols behind the SandboxHost seam
  • app/ — core orchestration, API server, Docker Engine API compat, thin CLI (abctl, not arcbox), daemon binary (arcbox-daemon), facade crate
  • guest/ — in-VM agent (cross-compiled for Linux)
  • tests/ — test resources and fixture build scripts
  • .agents/skills/ — shared Claude Code skills (symlinked from .claude/skills/)
  • docs/ — supplementary documentation (boot assets, daemon lifecycle)

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 194 lines · 3,168 tokens per session scan A 9b7c64e47512

Subscribe to this mod's changes

arcbox CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository arcboxlabs/arcbox (2,893 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 3,168 tokens to every session, about $0.0158 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.