The main thing matchlock adds over general-purpose vm/container tooling is agent specific network and filesystem (wip) controls, so if an agent goes rogue it can't exfiltrate your API keys, and damage largely mitigated. You'd have to build all of that yourself on top of LXD (possibly similar to matchlock).

There's also the DX side - OCI image support, highly programmable, fuse for workspace sharing. It runs on both linux and mac with a unified interface, so you get the same/similar experience locally on a Mac as you do on a linux workstation.

Mostly it's built for the purpose of "running `claude --dangerously-skip-permissions` safely" use case rather than being a general hypervisor.

1. Containers aren't a security boundary. Yes they can be used as such, but there is too much overhead (privilege vs unprivileged, figuring out granular capabilities, mount permissions, SELinux/AppArmor/Seccomp, gVisor) and the whole thing is just too brittle.

2. lxd VMs are QEMU-based and very heavy. Great when you need full desktop virtualization, but not for this use case. They also don't work on macOS.

Using Apple virtualization framework (which natively supports lightweight containers) on macOS and a more barebones virtualization stack like Firecracker on Linux is really the sweet spot. You get boot times in milliseconds and the full security of a VM.