Turn And Face The Strange

Sprites are a beautiful place to make an abstraction.

But I have never used a buggier infrastructure product in 30 years of development than when I tried sprites. Data loss left and right, sprites going into unconnectable zombie mode. Couldn't use even load snapshots because half the system seemed to think the sprite was fine, and half seemed to think it was dead. I gave up after two weeks of losing stuff over lunch or overnight or in the middle of working. I vividly remember scrolling through my terminal history, copy/pasting out work I could find to save from a dead sprite. I would guess that half or more of the sprites I launched had some kind of problem.

Hope they get things stable. The concept is great.

As an elixir dev fly was a company I very much wanted to succeed but I twice had to leave them because they just never found the right balance between cool engineering and ops.

For a long time they would have global outages where the status page would list everything as green and the only reason you'd know something was wrong was the forum threads. Their response was that they were too busy fixing the issues to update the status board. Right.

Then once they finally started updating the board they would go several hours between updates with no indication of what was happing "Region x is down" then nothing, again "too busy fixing the issue".

When they came out with paid support I signed up immediately only to find that it gave me an email address to contact support with fast responses promised but most of the time no one was monitoring it. I'd report large outages and not get back responses until the next day and on a few occasions I'd get back a response several days later being like "Can you explain the problem you're seeing?" No mate it was an outage several days ago.

This would all just be annoying customer service if it was a rare occurrence but the reality of using them was that I was dealing with major outages almost monthly at points. If you scroll back through my post history here there were brief periods where stability would improve and I'd get optimistic about them only for it to crash back down to regular outages again days after I posted.

I eventually had to move everything off them to self hosted again which is a pain but far less of a pain since my uptime is dramatically better(!) and when something breaks I know what it is.

I still want fly to succeed but if you're going to host peoples stuff you need to accept responsibility and move budget to ops. Otherwise just kill the hosting entirely and try to become another HashiCorp.

Most people are going under identity crisis right now because of recent LLM advancements. This post is a good example that shows that it's not only happening at the individual level, but also on the company/organization level.

Is it still worth building products or companies that can be one-shotted by AI? Probably not.

One interesting consequence is that this force everyone to be more ambitious and do something bigger that's impossible before.

I hope more people are working on something that can always bring net positive to humanity even if there are hundreds of people working on the same thing, like clean energy.

> We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.

Hard for me to see this as anything other than fly.io committing suicide. AI sandboxes are a crowded product space, basically a complete commodity at this point, and the new CEO will likely focus on profit to the detriment of creative vision.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

>We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.

Feels a bit rough to refocus the whole company and immediately bail out. At least give a new CEO a fighting chance by letting them set their own direction.

Sprites seems like a solid lifestyle business for a few friends, not a startup that has taken funding.

As a developer, I use docker/podman. Works great.

The new massive market that will open up, where grandma and grandpa are making apps, will be taken up by Lovable (and the like). Non-devs will not be using sprites.

You’re capturing some small percentage of existing developers.

I don't think these sprites are worth betting the company on, but I guess that will be for the new CEO to decide.

> A Sprite is a hardware-isolated execution environment for arbitrary code: a persistent Linux computer. Whether it's an AI agent like Claude Code or a binary your user just uploaded, Sprites are the simplest answer for "where should I run a blob of code".

I think eventually this isolation may be built in to Claude code / codex, or provided by AI companies themselves.

Saw this on my RSS feed and was surprised to see it hasn't been discussed yet on HN - fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads, but I had to go back over a year to find anything from them with more than a handful of comments. I guess they've become less relevant on here since they stopped allowing new users to host apps for free?

> Five of the most dangerous words in startups are “¿Por qué no los dos?”.

So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?

I've played around with a few sprites and it's a very interesting concept. You ssh in and then it feels very much like a local development environment, except the dev server you start up and run locally is actually out there and accessible. It's a great way to vibe code a low traffic, personal site. I wasn't super clear on just how much scale it actually can reach, though. Maybe I missed it but I didn't really know how beefy of a server it was on or if I could scale up. But maybe a big scale is not really the intention of this product?

Sprites are clearly the future. Are there plans to give it a web UI? I haven't minded ssh'ing in, but I've wanted to share this with my wife who would use a sprite on her iPad. Basically, ChatGPT but with a full sandboxed Linux environment that can host stuff is a pretty compelling offering.

> because your laptop stops running when you close the lid.

There's a world outside Apple.

Whenever I start to use fly.io they have outages all the time. And also I think they are a bit pricey too. I stopped using them, they have unreliable infra.

tl;dr - I really like your products, but just don’t have the cognitive resources for many learn->try->decide->use loops, and I don’t think I’m alone here. “Claude, use the sprite skill” is the vector of adoption which matches my mean available energy. —-

Some feedback on the pivot, from a user. Reading through the recent blog entries, there’s some Very Neat Stuff mentioned that integrates Sprites into tools like Hermes. I excitedly dug right in, to find that they aren’t anything usable, and the Hermes PR needs work. More salient though, that months-old Hermes PR *needs attention* if this is now your #1 business priority. Same goes for umpteen other integrations to shove the Sprites model (which is unique) into the popular agent harnesses.

I tried Sprites when sandboxes were peak exciting, and “yes I can ssh into this and run Claude” was useful but not groundbreaking. From the docs I’ve just read, I was holding it wrong, not taking advantage of its differentiating features. Great, ^H ooh look, mythos, shiny … and now it’s almost August.

And so honestly - despite my appreciation of Fly - with the firehose of Cool Shit, I don’t have the time or the inclination to learn how to hold it. Instead I want a skill/plugin/integration/llms.txt/sumerian tablet that I can give to my LLM to do that “multi-user auth and don’t worry about it you’ve got checkpoints” stuff for me. And I need this before I make any choices about investing in this thing over Bubblewrap or a VPS or the 100 other frictionless zero-knowledge sandboxy things that I am using already. Maybe you have this, and this is PEBKAC. Wouldn’t be the first time.

I did not know Theo had such influence on companies.

> Theo startled us, because we’re in the middle of a run of strong quarters that have included the best financial months in the company’s history.

I don't know if it's worse that Kurt is taking some bozo Youtube devfluencer seriously, that he was surprised that there was doubt in the future of Fly (whose reliability--but not customer service!--has been a joke for years), or that they continue to prioritize interesting engineering over basic success.

Bro, you just had to make a reasonable clone of Heroku. That's all you had to do.

Congrats on quitting!

This is probably great news. Using Fly at different points along the way has been one of the worst experiences I’ve had in terms of their persistent reliability issues and how they go dark on addressing those issues at times.

Whatever culture Kurt built for Fly, it was the wrong one.

Is tptacek still over there? If so, thoughts?

Well, fuck. ... we raised a fuckload of money and didn’t need more. And if we fail, we fail with our full asses.

I have seen this language from other companies to which I say "no". Being professional means being able to do good work, being polite, without lying, cheating, or stealing.

I do not want them to fail yet I would never use them despite liking their product. A few other companies behave the same way.