alt Hacker NewsThanks a ton for the feedback. Yeah, this is something we'll try to solve in the long term. One of the things that makes this work really smoothly for setup and speed is the ability to have a template box that you can instantly snapshot and fork (disk and RAM) to spin up new machines. There aren't many sandbox providers that do that well for running a full app and development environment, but I'm sure there will be more over time. And the per-second pricing means that you only pay when your agent is running.
You could use VPS, but spinning up and down boxes on inactivity takes a long time, and making changes to the template for new machines is less trivial there. If you're only paying for 1 VPS box, then you lose the "multiple independent machines" benefit, and I imagine things start to get more expensive even in the VPS world when you have 10 of them running at the same time (one per thread).
Pretty sure you could accomplish this in a large physical server or even a huge resource VM (that has KVM passthrough) with some sort of microvm technology? Then that would obviate the need for "multiple cloud instance per coding thread", it would just be a microvm on the large server.
Then again, I'm just the guy running his mouth, and you guys are the ones actually doing the work :)
BTW, looks very polished and thought-through, I may have to still give it a try!