At this point Claude Code appears to be the best terminal client for AI-aided programming. This is likely a temporary state of affairs. We run Claude code inside a Linux container so it can't touch the rest of the system.
You can install and run Claude as a binary blob inside a Guix container.
Note that while the source code is available, but neither Claude nor Claude code are free software. So don't make it a software deployment dependency.
The shell prompt looks like:
mkdir workdir && cd workdir mkdir -p $HOME/.local $HOME/.cache/claude $HOME/.claude guix shell -C -N -F curl bash openssl nss-certs coreutils grep sed jq git --share=$HOME/.local --share=$HOME/.cache/claude --share=$HOME/.claude curl -fvSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
Takes a few minutes. The installation is self contained. You probably want to make a guix manifest to run Claude inside some source directory. Set the path and run claude from ~/.local/bin/claude.
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin claude
The key gets written to ~/.claude.json. I simply copy that to capture state. Don't add it to git though.