Apple container is more akin to a replacement for docker or colima (although patterned more like Kata containers where each container is a separate vm as opposed to a bunch of containers in a single vm). It's a promising project (and nice to see Apple employees work to improve containers on macOS).

Hopefully, they can work towards being (1) more docker api compatible and (2) making it more composable. I wrote up https://github.com/apple/container/discussions/323 for more details on the limitations therein.

Originally, I planned to built shai to work really well on top of apple container but ultimately gave up because of the packaging issues.

No I haven't and that's interesting. Part of the yolobox project is an image that you may find useful. Comes preinstalled with leading coding agent CLIs. I'd like to make the ultimate vibe coding image. Is there anything special you're doing with the images?