Orbs

So this product is a thin wrapper over a remote virtual machine, a new name for remote virtual machines, and an exhortation to not look inside or reason about remote virtual machines?

I feel like up until recently this would been pitched as “the missing UX/DX for cloud compute”, or something. But instead now it’s marketed to this new trend where one should aggressively not understand the tower of abstractions one is standing on. Odd.

I think very soon big LLM providers (OpenAI et. al.) will provide a service like this. With the LLMs becoming faster, the agentic task completion bottleneck will soon move to the tool calls (both execution time and round-trip latency), so it makes sense to have a server host the project very close to the actual LLM doing the inference in order to minimize latency.

They've basically come up with what exe.dev has been doing for awhile now?

Except, exe.dev is more about, you have a VM and can do LLM work on it. Orbs seems to be minimizing the VM machinery more and making it about the "agentic experience."

Reminds me of fly.io's sprites (https://sprites.dev), but with a custom-built layer of UI, harness, and features.

Can anyone name a non-threatening orb? All the orbs are can think of are decidedly palantir-like - ostensibly useful, but corrupted by dark magics...

Feels like the tech industry balks at any whimsical introduction of feature names. Reminds me of Tangled’s spindles and knots and HN’s reaction.

They’re just names to be used within the context of their parent ecosystem. If it were a general purpose tool, I’d tend to agree.

Well they nailed the headline: make the reader go "wtf is Orbs" so they have to click on it.

So Orbs are like Grok Bots, I guess? Now every company has to copy this feature, and name it differently

For you not to waste your precious time - "orb" is just a virtual machine. And the thing requires a phone number, which it tells you at the END of the registration. I have new marketing jingle for that company: "market your AI slop with non-AI slop".

This is ChatGPT Work, right?