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Concepts

Profiles

A profile decides which agent a session runs and where it runs, on your host or inside a container.

What a profile is

A profile defines where a session runs and which agent it uses. A Local profile runs on your host, the way you would run claude or codex yourself. Container profiles run inside Apple's container runtime and carry a snapshot as their baseline. Both live under one Profiles concept, and you pick the profile when you create a session.

Choosing your agent

Each profile picks its agent, Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, and keeps its own command, model, and permissions. Orb keeps a separate configuration for both, so switching back and forth loses nothing. Sessions remember the agent they were started with. Orb runs the CLI already on your Mac and never installs or updates it.

  • Snapshots: the baseline a container profile boots from.
  • Containers: what running inside the container runtime means.