The Unix shell is over 50 years old, but it still defines how programmers use their computers. The design principles of Unix are timeless: write simple programs, compose them with standard interfaces. However, the software stack has expanded, and Unix interfaces are buried under layers of abstraction. What if the Unix shell took the best ideas from docker, make, powershell and nix? Native support for primitives like containers, secrets and service endpoints; typed objects; declarative execution; content-addressed artifacts; everything sandboxed and cached by default. This is what Dagger Shell offers: a bash syntax frontend for the Dagger Engine, which provides a state-of-the-art runtime and composition system. It's designed to complement your system shell, not replace it, and can be used for builds, tests, ephemeral environments, deployments, or any other task you want to automate from the terminal. With Dagger Shell, you only need two fundamental elements: shell and code, and it provides a cross-language ecosystem of reusable modules.