Cut your environment setup time in half with Chunk sidecar snapshots

Chunk sidecar snapshots let you freeze a pre-configured Linux test environment after dependency installation and cache it in CircleCI's cloud. Instead of reinstalling packages on every run, subsequent sidecar boots restore from the snapshot, cutting cold-start time from ~60 seconds to ~26 seconds. The tutorial walks through both an agent-assisted setup using Claude Code's /chunk-sidecar skill and a manual CLI flow: installing the Chunk CLI, running chunk init, creating a sidecar, running tests to validate, and snapshotting the result. Snapshots are org-scoped, shareable via a committed ID, and work for both human developers and AI agents running automated validation. When dependencies change, you re-snapshot and update the config pointer.