Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Colony — supported agents, pricing, licensing, platform requirements, and more.
What AI agents does Colony support?
Colony currently uses HumanLayer’s hld daemon as the primary agent backend, which manages Claude Code sessions via JSON-RPC over Unix socket. The architecture is designed to support additional agent backends in the future. Colony handles orchestration, environment isolation, and lifecycle management — the agent backend handles the AI execution.
Does Colony require Linux?
Colony can run on macOS for development. Full network namespace isolation requires Linux for production use. Windows support via WSL2 is planned.
How is Colony different from Docker?
Colony uses the same kernel primitive Docker uses internally (network namespaces) but without the container overhead. This means instant startup (<50ms vs seconds), zero memory overhead (vs 200MB+ per container), and native filesystem performance. See Colony vs Docker for details.
What is Jujutsu and why not Git?
Jujutsu (jj) is a modern VCS that treats the working copy as a commit and represents conflicts as first-class objects. This is critical for multi-agent workflows where many agents modify the same codebase simultaneously. Jujutsu sits on top of Git — your team still pushes to GitHub. See Why Jujutsu for details.
Is Colony open source?
Colony will be released under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0) — source-available from day one, with automatic conversion to Apache 2.0 after 2 years. The repository is currently private during pre-launch development. See License for details.
How does pricing work?
Pay-as-you-go starts at $2.50/colony-hour with no platform fee. Pro ($149/mo) includes 100 hours at an effective rate of $1.49/hr. Team and Enterprise plans are available for larger organizations. See Pricing for full details.
Can I self-host Colony?
Self-hosting is available on the Enterprise plan only. Pay-as-you-go, Pro, and Team customers use Colony’s hosted infrastructure. Enterprise customers can choose between cloud-hosted, self-managed on their own infrastructure, or dedicated hosting. Contact us if you need self-hosting.
Are AI agents secure in Colony?
Each agent runs in its own Linux network namespace — a kernel-level sandbox with its own network stack, IP address, and firewall rules. Agents can’t see each other’s traffic, can’t reach your host network, and can’t make unauthorized API calls. It’s the same network isolation you’d get from a dedicated VM, at zero overhead. See Security for the full threat model.
How many agents can I run in parallel?
Colony’s namespace-based isolation has negligible memory overhead. On a 16-core machine with 32GB RAM, you can comfortably run 100+ concurrent agents — compared to ~30 with Docker containers. The limit is CPU, not memory.