1. It's designed to give you an experience identical to using the Claude Code CLI in every respect, but with a much smaller blast radius. It's not currently set up to to work with your IDE. In that sense, it's a niche solution: I made it because I was trying to use a lot of agents at once, and I found that the rate-limiting factor was my ability to review and respond to permission pop-ups.

2. The VM is, in some sense, packaging. The main value adds are the two indirections between the agent and the outside world. Its access to `git` and `gh` are both mediated by a rules-based dispatcher that exercises fine-grained control in excess of what can be achieved with a PAT. HTTP requests pass through a middleware that block requests based on configurable rules.