Every job runs in a box: an isolated container with its own filesystem, holding one job’s folder and nothing else of yours.

The default: your Mac

Operator uses Apple’s own container runtime on Apple Silicon. A box gets the job’s workspace, the tools that job needs, and the model key for that one run.

It does not get your home folder, your other projects, your documents, or your browser. This is why an agent inside a box is not asked to approve each file write: the box is the answer to that question.

Images, and the one time wait

A box is built from an image, and an image is built once on your Mac. There is a small base image that most jobs use, and larger ones for jobs that need a real toolchain.

• First job on a new image: minutes, while it builds. You are told this is happening.
• Every job after: about a second.

Operator ships no image bytes. Everything is built locally from a small recipe the app carries, which is why nothing you run came from a registry someone else controls.

Big images check your free disk before they start and refuse politely if it is tight, rather than filling the drive.

Adding your own machines

You are not limited to the Mac. Under Settings you can connect other computers over SSH: a Linux box under a desk, a workstation, a VPS, a cloud instance. Once connected, the launch sheet lets you choose where a job runs.

The pattern people land on: heavy or long jobs on the Linux box, quick things on the Mac, everything supervised from the same phone.

Bring your own cloud is the same idea. Connect an account, and boxes come up in it. You pay your provider directly. Operator never resells compute.

Recipes

A recipe is a card that describes a kind of box: what language runtime, which tools, how much memory. When you launch a job you can see what is inside the box it will use, and you can edit the package lists before it starts if you need something extra.

Editing those lists gives you your own image, built and cached the same way, so the second run is fast again.

What a box can reach

By default a box can reach the network, because most work needs to. It cannot reach the rest of your Mac.

Some jobs run with the network off entirely, which is the right posture for anything working on data you would not want leaving the machine. The job says which it is.

Keeping it tidy

Images accumulate. The Mac app can list what is on disk and reclaim what is no longer used. If you are ever short on space, that is the first place to look, and the disk cleanup guidance in the Mac app will tell you what is actually large.