Interesting... but also the "power" from container is precisely that the description itself, i.e. the Dockerfile, is sufficient. So I'm not sure what the main advantage of either providing the image itself via a registry or providing just the Dockerfile with the base image to another registry then adding steps add.

> we brought down image creation time to mere seconds, even for images that were multiple GiB in size

this sounds interesting; for e.g., was wondering the other day if we could build images without actually pulling base images.. everytime we compile, we copy artifact(s) onto a multi-hundred MB base image which definitely doesn't need to be pulled everytime.

One of the neat things about something like this is that you could, in theory, do OS builds (think stuff like bootable containers) where you can, deterministically, configure an operating system to boot into all within the confines of your web browser.

We already have image builders for stuff like Talos Linux and Incus OS. This is not out of the realm of possibility.

> and we sometimes resign ourselves to the limitations of docker build and friends

What are the limitations of `docker build`?

I joked once that the future was dockerizing every single react component and running them in a wasm port of k8s... I hope that premonition isn't coming true!