Solomon Hykes

Solomon Hykes (born 1983) is a French-American software engineer best known for creating Docker, the containerisation technology that reshaped how software is packaged and shipped and became a foundation of modern cloud computing. After stepping back from Docker, he co-founded Dagger, a programmable engine for CI/CD and software workflows.

Reinventing the pipeline for agents

Hykes has repositioned Dagger squarely for the agentic era. His argument: AI coding agents work far faster than humans and cannot tolerate the slow, unrepeatable build-and-test pipelines that engineers have long accepted — so traditional CI/CD, as we know it, will give way to systems built for machines. He has released tools like Container Use, an open-source MCP server that gives coding agents isolated, containerised environments so they can work in parallel without stepping on each other, applying the same containerisation insight that made Docker successful to the problem of “containing agent chaos.”

Hykes frames the developer’s role as shifting from writing code to orchestrating a team of agents — enabling them, giving them clean environments, and moving up a level of abstraction while still shipping every day. He stresses that any real solution must support local execution, not just the cloud. It is a builder’s pragmatism: rather than debating whether agents will code, he is engineering the plumbing to make them productive.