Why krutrimbox

Coding agents are good at implementing a well-specified issue. The hard part is everything around that: giving the agent a safe place to work, stopping it from touching your GitHub state, sequencing dependent work, and handing off to a human when a step genuinely needs one. krutrimbox is the orchestration layer that handles all of it.

The problem

Pointing an agent straight at your working tree is risky. It can change files you didn't expect, and if you hand it a GitHub token it can push, comment, close, or merge on your behalf. Doing it by hand for every issue is tedious: you create branches, write prompts, review diffs, open PRs, and track what's already done.

How krutrimbox helps

Isolation by default. Every issue runs inside a Docker Sandbox with its own private clone of your repo. Agent changes never touch your working tree until krutrimbox commits and pushes them from the host.

A read-only security boundary. The only GitHub credential inside the sandbox is read-only. Every write — branch push, PR create/edit, comment, label, review request — happens on your host with your own credential. Even if the agent ignored every instruction, it cannot mutate GitHub state. See Authentication for how the boundary is enforced.

Issue-driven and resumable. krutrimbox discovers issues by label and assignee, implements a standalone issue directly or walks a parent's ordered sub-issues, and rebuilds its "done" set from Refs #<n> commit footers on the branch. Any run can resume where the last one stopped — even with a different agent.

Human-in-the-loop where it matters. An issue labeled ready-for-human pauses the run with an idempotent comment. A person finishes it and pushes a commit, and the next run picks up automatically.

Extensible at lifecycle points. krutrimbox fires named lifecycle hooks (today pull-request:ready) that a repository can attach actions to from .krutrimbox/config.json — run an AI review pass over the finished PR, post a comment, or invoke an allowlisted gh command — without changing krutrimbox. See Configuration › Hooks.

Language-agnostic. krutrimbox orchestrates; it doesn't build. The kb CLI is written in Node + TypeScript, but the issues it implements can live in any language. You make project tooling available to the agent through the sandbox template, not by changing krutrimbox.

How it fits together

For the full mechanics of a run — branch creation, sandbox lifecycle, commits, pull request, HITL pauses, and lifecycle hooks — see Factory Flow.