Jay discovered OrbStack the way he discovered most things: by reading a Hacker News comment thread at 11 PM when he should have been sleeping. Someone had mentioned it as a Docker Desktop alternative for macOS. Lighter. Faster. Native Apple Silicon support. The comment had twelve upvotes and no replies, which in Jay's experience was the signature of something genuinely good—the best tools didn't generate arguments.
He installed it the next morning. The download was small. The installer was fast. The application appeared in his menu bar as a tiny icon that did nothing except be available when needed. No splash screen, no onboarding wizard, no "tip of the day." Jay appreciated this restraint the way a carpenter appreciates a well-balanced hammer.
Then he ran leash --open claude.
The container started in 2.1 seconds.
Jay checked the number twice. With Docker Desktop, the same container had been taking 8 seconds. Sometimes 9. Sometimes, on a Monday morning after Docker had been idle all weekend and needed to restart its Linux VM, as long as 14. The startup time was the kind of friction that you stopped noticing after a while, the way you stopped noticing a creaky stair. But it was always there, consuming seconds that compounded across dozens of sessions per day.
2.1 seconds. He ran it again. 1.9 seconds. Again: 2.0 seconds. Consistent. Predictable. Fast.
The difference was architectural. Docker Desktop ran a Linux virtual machine inside macOS and ran containers inside that VM. OrbStack used a more lightweight virtualization layer that was optimized for Apple Silicon. Less overhead. Less memory. Less latency. The containers behaved identically—same images, same networking, same volume mounts. The only difference was speed.
"Navan," Jay said. "Switch your container runtime to OrbStack."
Navan looked up from his notebook. "Why?"
"Two-second container starts."
Navan switched. He timed his first leash --open claude with the stopwatch app on his phone, a habit he'd developed from benchmarking Swift compile times. Two point three seconds. He nodded.
"Six seconds doesn't sound like much," Jay said. "But we launch fifty containers a day. That's five minutes of waiting. Per person. Per day. Fifteen minutes across the team. An hour a week. Fifty hours a year."
"You calculated that very quickly," Navan said.
"I've been thinking about it since last night."
They updated the Leash documentation to recommend OrbStack for macOS users. The recommendation was a single line, placed above the Docker instructions but below the system requirements. Not mandatory. Not enforced. Just a suggestion, backed by numbers.
From 8 seconds to 2. A seventy-five percent reduction in startup latency. The kind of improvement that changed behavior, that made you more willing to spin up a container for a small task instead of running the agent unconstrained because the sandbox felt too slow.
Speed is a feature. Speed is a security feature. The faster the safe path, the more people take it.
"Speed is a security feature." This is the insight that most security teams miss. If the secure path is slow, people will take the insecure path. Make the sandbox fast and people will use the sandbox.