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.
Eventually they abandoned the company but stuck with the concept by going with another company. Complaints were the same, extremely buggy interface, dataloss, but also terrible support. That may have been there fault though for not using their actual domain for the test period (and not mentioning that they were an F200 or something).
I am not a F200 company or anything, just a normal guy but I have the opinion that I personally like the companies who treat normal accounts and the general experience/support. I have just felt like as if its a good litmus test depending on things. What are your opinion on things and was the enterprise client opening up a normal account intentionally similar to line of thinking or for other reasons?
I also think he might have not wanted the attention that putting the company name on the account might get.
Were those good reasons? Honestly I don’t know, but apparently the experience of using the product spoke for itself.
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.
I also don't see how the cloud-for-agents will break the AWS monopoly: AWS already is the cloud for agents! As the article notes all the pain of using AWS is trivialized by agents (and IaC).
To me the value now is in building the right tools for agents to make better decisions, not fighting for basis points on hardware margin in the orchestration or model serving layer.
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.
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.
> 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.
You got claude to deploy. Cool.
I clicked a button in my PaaS and I have an oncall responder and incident manager ready to go.
I have a question regarding sprites but when executing unsafe code, because by definition its unsafe, what happens if the code violates terms of service of fly/sprites. Would only that particular sprite be removed or would it escalate to whole account level ban and the risks attached to it or would they take a look at repeated offenders.
from fly's terms of service Section 1.4(d) and section 9.2 respectively
> Customer will not... "sublicense any of Customer's rights under this Agreement, or otherwise use the Fly.io Services for the benefit of a third party."
> "Either party may terminate this Agreement for no reason or any reason upon written notice to the other party, effective immediately at the end of the then current Subscription Term."
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.
The message is fine, but it was a weird choice to have it on fly.io instead of a personal blog
Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title. People read as far as "are nuts", got offended and refused to engage with the content of the piece.
This opening paragraph does a much better job of capturing the core argument:
> Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them, because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.
It's easy to forget how different early 2025 was to today. You would generally feel like you were in an inverse Emperor's New Clothes situation if you believed what your own eyes told you about how LLMs wrote code. That's not the case anymore; you hardly ever see people talking about (or, really, extrapolating wildly about) hallucination today.
(For a lot of reasons I think a lot about how that post was received in 2025 and what the world is like today. "Vindicated" doesn't capture the feeling.)
I still find it incredibly troubling. Not because the substance was wrong, but because a person of your caliber has stooped to the level of writing provocative headlines and language to attract attention. I strongly believe world-class technologists are supposed to be above that sort of thing. Leadership matters: not just thought leadership, but attitudinal leadership.
Pretty sure the content of a company's blog post being overtly arrogant, abrasive, dismissive and generally dickish was also a problem.
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass.
> Yeah, we get it. You don’t believe in IPR. Then shut the fuck up about IPR. Reap the whirlwind.
> but it’ll never be AGI -- I don’t give a shit.
this was amazing post. i enjoyed reading it, it was relevant to some work stuff i was battling with. the linked articles at the end were amazing too. i had tonnes of respect for fly.io and yourself because of these posts. technically informative, clear, engaging. great stuff.
the llm post? complete polar opposite.
> I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI". I wish I could tell you I've come to see the error of my ways, but I continue not to care about it.
thanks for the snark, and kinda proving my previous point about the tone of the article that was supposed to be a personal blog post and then ended up on a company blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052217
It's weird to watch people write as if I'm trying to back away from that article or hedge or whatever. I expect to wrap my career up at some point and look at that post as one of the better and more valuable things I've ever written.
"I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI"."
appears to be dripping with snark
These people will be eating their hat soon if they aren't already.
But that doesn't mean they are not doing stuff. It's just HN doing HN things. At the moment we're into "AI is eating the world alive" and other topics are in the background.
So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?
> Fly Machines and our Platform As A Service features aren’t going anywhere. But Sprites was the product of a tiny skeleton crew inside of Fly.io[†], and now it isn’t.
So it's both indeed.
Without any special insight into fly.io, I'd bet the situation is the latter. You keep the lights and fix security issues for the existing infra (which incidentally gives you money out of cashflow to invest in new efforts).
There's a world outside Apple.
Whatever culture Kurt built for Fly, it was the wrong one.
Random 1990s nostalgia unlock.
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.