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Turn And Face The Strange

fly.io

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Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#71

Post by otterley »

tptacek wrote: post #30
simonw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think that post from June 2025 has aged pretty well. The Coding Agent revolution hadn't really happened at that point (Claude Code was only ~4 months old) so the paraphrased message "this stuff is actually useful for programming, saying it's all just stochastic parrots misses the mark" was still non-obvious to a whole lot of people. Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title. People read as…

The title was the point of the post. I have acquaintances who are still sore at me about it. But the problem wasn't that people disagreed with me about LLMs; the problem was that we were locked in an unproductive and static equilibrium of people talking past each other and hedging their way out of any direct, empirical confrontation over what was happening. It's easy to forget how different early 2025 was to today. Y…

> The title was the point of the post.

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.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#72

Post by threecheese »

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.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#73

Post by ericpauley »

ofjcihen wrote: post #55
danielvf wrote: post #43

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…

Can second this. I had an enterprise client that was interested in using these for fast development etc. Wasn’t my project or the reason I was there but I was curious so I kept up with it. 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…

I won't claim strong enthusiasm for Sprites, but in my experience (albeit way back in 2021) Fly's support was absolutely top-notch, up to and including Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments. This was as a small business only billing a few hundred a month.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#74

Post by ofjcihen »

ericpauley wrote: post #73
ofjcihen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can second this. I had an enterprise client that was interested in using these for fast development etc. Wasn’t my project or the reason I was there but I was curious so I kept up with it. 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…

I won't claim strong enthusiasm for Sprites, but in my experience (albeit way back in 2021) Fly's support was absolutely top-notch, up to and including Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments. This was as a small business only billing a few hundred a month.

This would have been much more recent. Maybe something changed?

Either way I wasn’t privy to the actual details, just that it was one of their gripes.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#75

Post by throwaw12 »

yellow_lead wrote: post #33

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…

I think sprites are very cool abstraction.

I know git worktrees solve similar problem, but you can use sprites for quickly spinning up your instance and run your service and hand it over to coding agent to improve a feature.

you can run multiple parallel agents to do same and choose one of them as a final result, and you are not constrained by number of ports or your CPU (because some agents are CPU hungry at the moment)

Think about even more use cases, add to that RAM shortage is not going away yet, you can run 100s of agents in those sprites

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#76

Post by simonw »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #70
satvikpendem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good discussion on the HN thread about that article. To be honest, based on the latest models and agentic engineering, that blog post is definitely right. It's not 2023, 2024, or 2025 anymore, agents have gotten a lot better.

It's not 2023, 2024, or 2025, but LLMs still suck at programming. Just like every other time AI enthusiasts have claimed the latest and greatest is so much better than what came before.

> LLMs still suck at programming

They really don't. You're clearly the intended audience for https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ !

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#77

Post by sanswork »

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.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#78

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

ofjcihen wrote: post #68
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

I had some conversations with the lead on the project and his reasoning was something along the lines of “we’ve been suckered into using something with sweetheart attention before only to have the rug pulled when we’re ‘reliant’”. 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…

> “we’ve been suckered into using something with sweetheart attention before only to have the rug pulled when we’re ‘reliant’”.

It makes me feel like this is like the corporate form of love-bombing perhaps, oof, I think that two reasons for this could be that most companies would want to do anything for contracts with large companies, (especially within B2B?), of course I feel as if some additional attention is a good point but excess of anything is bad as you have said that they learnt from. Its good to know that they learnt from it though :-D and perhaps other companies could also learn from it as I believe that wisdom comes from learning from other people's mistakes as well.

Another reason is that companies like to really show about other large companies using it. I have heard when a company literally said (users of this product also use)... and then proceeds to show the names of recognizable companies like Lovable/OpenAI/Anthropic/Google. (that too very sneakily)

There is also the part of used by engineers at (Big tech) etc. but I think I remember cases where the engineer doesn't use it as part of their day job at Big tech but rather on the side and there are so many engineers and the amount of use could vary just as well (because otherwise the company could just say "used at Google/Microsoft etc." itself.)

I found that part silly but perhaps my heart still tries to understand other people and my explaination of it is perhaps that with all the new companies, one of the filters that people select for trust is seeing what other large companies are. This makes us, say, transfer the trust we have from the brand of these large companies (Google/Microsoft/Lovable etc.) and into smaller brands.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#79

Post by [deleted] »

subarctic wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? We ran a big post about Litestream Writeable VFS just a couple months ago, and we've had several big posts over the last 12 months, including the Sprite launch. We got pretty busy, and there's a lot going on, and I am a bottleneck on big posts going up on the blog. We have a couple months of technical catching up to do. But it's not like we've vanished off HN.

Ahh ok I just did a search on hn.algolia.com for fly.io and nothing came back with 10+ comments in the past year (until I posted this). But now I'm realizing they just don't include the url in the search, even though it says they do

[deleted]

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#80

Post by losvedir »

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.
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