alt.hn

7/25/2026 at 8:43:11 PM

Turn And Face The Strange

 https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites/

by subarctic

7/25/2026 at 10:32:28 PM

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.

by danielvf

7/25/2026 at 11:39:18 PM

I operate an app that orchestrates code running on a bunch of Sprites. A few months ago it was an exceptionally buggy service, frequently just fully broken or losing data (had to get support involved to recover one that got into a fully broken state), but from what I've seen at least they've become much more reliable in the past two months or so.

I evaluated Fly.io itself several years ago and found it unacceptably buggy as well for any real use case at the time, but I kept an eye on it and today I operate a few production workloads on it that are very stable and reliable—I figured the same would be true for Sprites and it seems to be taking shape that way.

by macNchz

7/26/2026 at 1:09:39 AM

This isn't even a Sprite specific thing. Their whole platform is known for this for years and they have yet to even care to fix it.

So it might be good the CEO is quitting because he has done a horrible job.

by impulser_

7/26/2026 at 2:56:33 AM

Their pricing...also leaves much to be desired. They are almost at Big Three cloud/Vercel level of cost with none of the stability. Their anycast network however is decent.

by storywatch

7/25/2026 at 10:47:04 PM

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 using their actual domain for the test period (and not mentioning that they were an F200 or something).

by ofjcihen

7/25/2026 at 11:15:17 PM

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.

by ericpauley

7/26/2026 at 7:24:48 AM

> Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments

Typical Kurt in Founder Mode. For the first 3+ years (immediately following their "launch hn"), Kurt was almost ever present in the forums.

> claim strong enthusiasm for Sprites

Fly.io has had their own share of problems with various features they've built, but once the lego blocks fit & click, there isn't a New Cloud better at DX than it. Though, like TFA points out, the world since Opus 4 has looked very, very different.

by ignoramous

7/25/2026 at 11:18:38 PM

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.

by ofjcihen

7/25/2026 at 11:03:08 PM

> (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?

by Imustaskforhelp

7/25/2026 at 11:08:50 PM

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 using the product spoke for itself.

by ofjcihen

7/25/2026 at 11:34:59 PM

> “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.

by Imustaskforhelp

7/25/2026 at 11:28:21 PM

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.

by sanswork

7/26/2026 at 12:45:34 AM

> 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.

Are you talking about AWS or Fly here? I seriously cannot tell.

by vinnymac

7/26/2026 at 12:52:55 AM

I've certainly experienced it with AWS too where the explanation was that so many SLAs were tied to that green light that it had to have really senior sign off which is also insane. But the big difference is the frequency of impact.

by sanswork

7/25/2026 at 10:38:30 PM

> 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.

by wavemode

7/25/2026 at 11:08:11 PM

The AI sandbox play also confuses me because (aside from the fractional pay-as-you-use billing) it's trivially implemented on top of any VM/container as a service provider. Given the reduced importance of data retention (the containers are disposable) and ability to redo work trivially you can even go a step further and have your agent spin it up on bare metal. Turns out agents spend most of their time waiting on GPUs so with memory dedup on your own similar workloads you can run "hundreds" of them on pretty minimal hardware.

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.

by ericpauley

7/26/2026 at 8:21:04 PM

1) Slap AI on the pitch deck

2) Acquihired by one of the AI companies, probably after a bidding war because everyone has infinite money and wants to block competitors from getting talent

by nikanj

7/25/2026 at 10:45:12 PM

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.

by karimf

7/26/2026 at 3:58:45 AM

> Scott was the CEO of Docker, and led that through a really challenging time that began with Docker’s own enterprise-vs.-developer identity crisis and ended with them blowing the doors off the business.

Did Docker "blew the doors off the business"? Does he mean that in a Boeing sense?

by ethersteeds

7/26/2026 at 5:32:03 AM

Scott was instrumental in turning around Docker (which was "broken" [0]), after a $23m Series B raise from Arjun Sethi at Tribe Capital: https://medium.com/better-programming/the-greatest-startup-t... / https://archive.vn/loTwW

[0] Some interesting remarks on it by Bryan Cantrill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460504

by ignoramous

7/26/2026 at 6:28:08 AM

OK yes thanks for that link

Speaking personally, the fate of Docker, Inc. was clear to me when they took their $40M Series C round in 2014. I had met with Solomon in April 2014 (after their $15M Series B) and tried to tell him what I had learned at Joyent: that raising a ton of money without having a concrete and repeatable business would almost inevitably lead to poor decision making

And it's hard not to see the same pattern here: https://fly.io/blog/we-raised-a-bunch-of-money/ - June 2023

This past July, we raised $25MM from A16Z and our existing investors, including Intel Capital and Dell. Recently, we raised an additional $70MM led by EQT Ventures.

Basically Scott Johnston is the guy that recoups money for investors, and in Docker's case, I recall that involved clawing back some value from users

From OP: As a shareholder of Fly.io, for this stage in Fly.io’s lifecycle, I liked his playbook better than mine. As the CEO of Fly.io, I liked the prospect of him doing all this work more than I liked the prospect of me doing it. We took a lot of time to work this out, and ultimately the board and I convinced him to take the job.

by chubot

7/25/2026 at 11:00:16 PM

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.

by emerongi

7/26/2026 at 1:25:06 AM

In theory I'm in OP's described target market here, b/c I am absolutely terrified of agents wrecking my pooter/home network/life as they 100x my sw dev. Every day a new story comes out about OpenCode, CC whatever being a security nightmare.

If it's so easy to containerize these things then why aren't more devs doing it and these stories going away? I for one am actively avoiding the agentic coding switch because I have no interest in opening my home environment to a remote corporate LLM just to write code faster. But of course I'm missing out, as soon as I have more than one source file that I want my chat LLM to analyze in a single go.

by spopejoy

7/26/2026 at 2:17:41 PM

Devs don't do it because we are a lazy bunch, which is the same reason we like using LLMs so much, because it taps into our laziness.

by aeden

7/26/2026 at 5:48:13 PM

Nah, I think this falls squarely in the ideal space for devs: we want to be even lazier, so we build tools to allow that. Yak shaving is the premier lifestyle for devs. Some get so into it that they stop programming, move to the hills, and raise yaks so they can shave them.

As evidence, I point to the massive number of mostly-LLM-generated LLM-sandboxing projects. Practically every day, I see a new 100k+ LoC project to make agentic coding safe, with shiny emoji-and-badge-encrusted readmes...

... and no issues, no forks, and usually no new commits after the first two weeks. Try to use one and you'll quickly see they're all extremely bug-ridden (one of the few constants with LLM code). And some have stood the test of time and have ten thousand issues that are mostly regressions that were once fixed but come back every other week. But they keep popping up rapidly!

by Groxx

7/26/2026 at 12:22:02 AM

>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.

by cube00

7/25/2026 at 10:25:37 PM

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.

by yellow_lead

7/25/2026 at 10:29:22 PM

Sprites are about more than just providing an environment for Claude Code et al to run code in. They're also useful for anyone who's building their own product that needs an inexpensive way to execute unsafe code.

by simonw

7/25/2026 at 10:44:57 PM

And the way you compete is be cheap enough and DX. Because Lambda.

by hahahaa

7/25/2026 at 10:50:57 PM

Why are you so sure "DX" is the right way to compete with commodity full-stack hosting? Have you had Claude deploy on AWS recently? It one-shots deployments just fine.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:56:33 PM

DX ups its game.

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.

by hahahaa

7/26/2026 at 12:09:06 AM

I'm being serious, not trying to dunk, but can you get me to the place where DX has upped its game to the point where Claude can't just do it?

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 5:30:36 AM

Let's take Jira for example. Why do people use that instead of one shotting "Build me Jira" into their AI.

A story as old as the hills: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Having x y z set up for you and maintained is kinda useful because you can focus on α

And no Claude is not AGI so you need to babysit to get that done.

by hahahaa

7/26/2026 at 5:35:58 AM

Do you think Jira is going to survive this moment? I don't. I've never met anybody who likes Jira.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 1:18:39 PM

I never met anyone who likes Oracle ($331bn mkt cap), SAP (€187bn) or Salesforce ($134bn) either.

However as businesses they sell, they know how to sell and know what they customers need. They need a lot of compliance and IT maturity for sure.

Enterprise (and even SME) customers don't want to fuck around with Claude and use hero shadow IT. They want to buy shit like Jira because it turns out cheaper than DIY even with AI. They know it will be HIPAA and SOC2 and most other things they desire like that.

AI does kill the tail end but Atlassian was always practically free to the kind of person who can replace it with a vibe coded weekend project (try it! sign up for a Jira!).

While you are there, you can go and set up myriad AI workflows, build a forge (plugin) app using AI in studio then set up Rovo AI automations. Yes it is very AI native now.

Some day you can type "make the next Google" into AI and it will do the paperclip thing. Until then... SaaS is not dead. I repeat SaaS is not dead. Not dying. Disrupted yes. Not dead.

by hahahaa

7/26/2026 at 2:27:45 PM

I think I'll be the 10,000th industry person to say that Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce are deeply at risk at the present moment, and if they have a chance at retaining value it's only because they're Systems Of Record, and that very few companies are going to make the mistake of letting them lock up their data and keep it away from agents in the future.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:54:08 PM

> execute unsafe code.

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."

by Imustaskforhelp

7/26/2026 at 10:30:15 AM

ignoring the TOS angle

unsafe code is likely being used as in unsafe rust, which is different from exploit code

certainly the wording seems to leave the door open for potentially compromised code as in supply-chain attack credential stealer or prompt injection data exfiltration, but sprites are not marketed as sandboxes for malware detonation

by 0123456789ABCDE

7/25/2026 at 11:20:17 PM

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

by throwaw12

7/25/2026 at 10:43:26 PM

Yuk I don't want to rent my appartment from my drug dealer. I love I can say thanks for the code Claude now fuck you I am deploying it (waggles finger in westerly direction...) there.

by hahahaa

7/25/2026 at 8:44:55 PM

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?

by subarctic

7/25/2026 at 10:19:16 PM

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.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:46:34 PM

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

by subarctic

7/25/2026 at 10:50:00 PM

Right, just go to the front page and click on the linked domain on this story, it'll take you to all the previous submissions from our blog. It's been a light summer on blog posts, to be sure! But that's nothing new.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 9:57:46 PM

they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article[1]. haven't read a blog post since.

[1] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

by rileymichael

7/25/2026 at 10:01:15 PM

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.

by satvikpendem

7/25/2026 at 10:06:08 PM

I think the effect was less about it being correct or not, but instead more about if fly.io would treat humans as first class users compared to agents or not in the future.

The message is fine, but it was a weird choice to have it on fly.io instead of a personal blog

by its-summertime

7/25/2026 at 10:18:57 PM

It's just marketing, going with the times of lots of vibe coders now suddenly wanting to put something on the Internet. I wouldn't read too much into it as a fundamental philosophy.

by satvikpendem

7/25/2026 at 10:04:31 PM

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 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.

by simonw

7/25/2026 at 10:22:55 PM

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. 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.)

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 11:12:10 PM

> 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.

by otterley

7/26/2026 at 12:05:04 AM

The funniest thing about this post is that I was writing it, in my head, to a specific group of developers I've worked with, and who I know to be smart and more talented than me. What I should have seen coming was that when I described a group of people as the smartest developers I know, everybody who read it would think it was about them.

Live and learn.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 11:58:34 PM

fwiw, I don't think it was deliberately provocative for the goal of "attracting attention", it seemed to be his genuine belief.

I remember feeling similarly after seeing so many people denying what had already changed.

by usef-

7/26/2026 at 12:06:15 AM

He called it A heartfelt provocation.

by pseudalopex

7/25/2026 at 11:44:21 PM

[flagged]

by ai_critic

7/25/2026 at 11:45:44 PM

> consider how difficult it would be to find a nice way of writing an article

Writing is often difficult. That's what makes good writing so distinctive and valuable. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth putting in the effort.

> "You are all fucking idiots" is sometimes a reasonable starting point.

It might be a good starting point in one's head (which, admittedly, it often is for me, but I then try to convert that into something more persuasive and less divisive). I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.

by otterley

7/25/2026 at 11:52:55 PM

> I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.

In a saner timeline I'm right there with you. Certain types of policy and cognitive errors, though, remove the floor on communication decency--some popular conceptions are just so incredibly backwards that it's seemingly a disservice to treat them as anything worthy of more gentle correction.

by ai_critic

7/26/2026 at 12:09:38 AM

It wasn't my starting point.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:16:17 PM

> Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title.

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.

by dijksterhuis

7/25/2026 at 10:27:53 PM

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.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:40:24 PM

do you remember writing this? https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...

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

by dijksterhuis

7/25/2026 at 10:51:27 PM

I'm not being snarky. I genuinely do not care about AGI.

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.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 11:05:15 PM

>I'm not being snarky

"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

by john_strinlai

7/26/2026 at 12:05:50 AM

Have I spoiled the solemnity of the subthread where we're litigating whether we "lost our aura" by writing a blog post?

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 12:09:23 AM

no? its just weird to write an obviously snarky sentence and then follow up with "im not being snarky".

you have no problem owning the tone of the blog post, why not own the tone of your comment?

by john_strinlai

7/26/2026 at 1:13:43 AM

I can't judge how snarky I'm being overall. I'm writing like I would on any HN thread. What I was saying was: my lack of concern about AGI is not snark.

It's weird to me that anybody would call that out. Are you super worried about AGI?

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 1:23:47 AM

>I can't judge how snarky I'm being overall

okay, well, then this is me telling you that overall, the comment with the fake apology came across as really snarky.

>Are you super worried about AGI?

no. i typically agree with your takes on ai. i usually just happily ignore your tone and enjoy the substance of your comments but i thought this particular exchange from you was exceptionally odd so i commented on it.

by john_strinlai

7/26/2026 at 1:27:42 AM

I am paying attention to what you're saying but I think if you look at the context of this thread and take a beat you might sense, like I do, that the bar for charity is a bump or two lower than it normally is.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 10:15:02 AM

> 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.

i deliberately pointed out past praise and respect i had for your writing. i made an effort to go out of my way to provide an example of good stuff. as someone said in the andrew kelley black pill youtube comments -- people are a package. i too can be abrasive, dismissive, arrogant etc. i am a flawed human being too. so, in the spirit of not being a complete fucking dick i decided to point out something good you have written.

i'm highly critical of the article in question. i have the freedom and right to be critical of it, whether or not you think it's one of your best pieces of writing. and your general tone in this thread (and previous threads) has only solidified my view.

by dijksterhuis

7/26/2026 at 3:49:10 PM

You gotta understand the context we're discussing this in, where a post from a year ago that raised a mob of anti-AI people got brought into a discussion about this, a post that is by itself a tricky needle to thread. That was an unpleasant and unproductive thing to do, but more important a cringe thing to do: there are apparently people still in their feelings about that post despite everything that happened in the year since to moot the debate.

You're of course free to have your own opinion! I'm just relating mine.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 3:41:55 AM

dijksterhuis said their point was your tone. Not your AGI opinion.

by pseudalopex

7/25/2026 at 10:19:54 PM

Indeed, it's not worth engaging with AI skeptics anymore today, it's just a waste of time. If they don't see the value then they probably never will, and that's not my problem.

by satvikpendem

7/25/2026 at 10:24:23 PM

This is what I mean about the static equilibrium in 2025. That's what everyone was doing: just writing the other side off. That post of mine did a lot of things, but it did not do that.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 2:18:16 PM

I never said your post did, and anyway I'm talking about today in 2026.

by satvikpendem

7/26/2026 at 2:28:27 PM

I wouldn't write the same post in 2026. What would be the point? Everybody already accepts the arguments in it.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:20:29 PM

It's right in the point it brings up that modern LLMs are serious engineering and quite a bit capable at many tasks. It's not correct on the rest where Ptacek appears dismissive because 'he doesn't wanna hear' about copyright and other things, maybe we chalk it up to an upset guy at people he believes and maybe knows are wrong and ignore the rest of the spiel, but I won't.

by latency-guy2

7/25/2026 at 11:11:38 PM

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.

by bigstrat2003

7/25/2026 at 11:23:20 PM

> LLMs still suck at programming

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

by simonw

7/26/2026 at 12:15:21 AM

All of the contents of the article are basically correct (minus the agi bit), but god the tone is insufferable. I doubt it's done anything but dig sceptics further in tbh.

by ViscountPenguin

7/25/2026 at 10:57:20 PM

the way certain people at that company speak to others (e.g. that post) is why they will never count me as a customer. although im sure they dont care.

by john_strinlai

7/25/2026 at 10:14:48 PM

Wow. Opinions on LLMs aside, the CEO writing an article like that makes me think fly.io is a deeply unserious company.

by wackget

7/25/2026 at 10:15:41 PM

The CEO didn't write that article. I did. I was going to run it on my personal blog, and he asked me to run it there. Be mad at him for the right reason.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 1:13:46 PM

I've been reading these comments and finally read the "Nuts" blog post. I guess I understand the butthurt, but I really appreciate this style of writing. Curt, forceful, to the point, fronting any internal conflict the reader may hold. This is clearly painful for conflicted readers. For the unconflicted, it is satisfying to merely agree or disagree.

by RickHull

7/25/2026 at 10:34:17 PM

[flagged]

by ragall

7/25/2026 at 10:34:51 PM

I am, as I'm fond of pointing out, very comfortable with who does and doesn't take me seriously.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:16:14 PM

[flagged]

by latency-guy2

7/25/2026 at 10:25:52 PM

Maybe tone it down? personal attacks are not needed or wanted. Let's discuss AI, if not keep your comments for yourself

by sisve

7/25/2026 at 10:10:57 PM

> they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article

These people will be eating their hat soon if they aren't already.

by echelon

7/25/2026 at 9:37:29 PM

Did they? I have stuff I launched in the last two months that’s still under the $5 limit and haven’t paid a thing.

by jagged-chisel

7/25/2026 at 9:48:14 PM

Oh ok i thought they charged a flat fee to use the platform now but maybe that was a temporary thing. My account is a few years old so i wouldn't know, i still have a few apps running on the smallest vm size and it's always under $5

by subarctic

7/25/2026 at 9:46:55 PM

It's probably getting less discussion because there's less user energy, the existing VM / database product has clearly not been a top focus for a while and in any case that business is becoming even more of a tough commodity for the reasons the post points out.

by hedgehog

7/25/2026 at 10:30:22 PM

> fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads

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.

by rdtsc

7/25/2026 at 9:57:55 PM

I think they became less relevant, at least amongst human users, when they hit a particularly rough patch with awful reliability issues a couple of years back. At least that's when my own social circle and loose constellation of developer acquaintances started saying "we should probably avoid Fly.io".

by enraged_camel

7/26/2026 at 1:46:06 AM

My first introduction to the company was the "You're all nuts" blog post that's being litigated elsewhere in the comments. I'm not an AI skeptic (just an AGI/ASI skeptic) so I didn't feel like it was targeted at me, but the whole tone and standoffishness it gave left a very bad first impression.

by nozzlegear

7/25/2026 at 9:53:01 PM

No one talks about new software anymore. All the conversation is meta about LLMs that write software instead. This is a dead career, I’m just waiting for the LLMs to start writing code in binary.

by dyauspitr

7/25/2026 at 10:01:25 PM

> 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?

by its-summertime

7/25/2026 at 10:15:15 PM

Yeah that seems like a weird way to end an article that includes this paragraph:

> 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.

by jorams

7/25/2026 at 10:25:37 PM

Well, there's doing both in terms of focus and effort, basically treating them as peer products. And then there is doing both in terms of "keeping the lights on for one, and focusing on the other".

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).

by mooreds

7/25/2026 at 11:37:03 PM

This really sucks. I not only like fly a lot, I have two production apps; thousands in annual creds up for renewal soon; and some mildly embarrassing discussions about migrations to have.

by x0x0

7/26/2026 at 12:07:36 AM

What sucks? I strongly advise you not to axiomatically derive our product roadmap from HN comments trying to interpret that post.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 1:36:47 AM

sucks: fly backburnering the app platform to build sprites.

> [...] Sprites, and focusing the company on [Sprites] and the problem they solve.

Then later

> first path [the thing I like/advocate/use] and [Sprites] ... We do one thing or the other. We don’t limp in on both. And if we fail, we fail with our full asses.

Hard to interpret that as anything but the thing I like being backburnered. Which is how it goes, but sucks.

by x0x0

7/26/2026 at 1:38:58 AM

Ah, that's fair! I just got the impression that other people on this thread were axiomatically deriving that we were killing Machines, rather than just shifting the roadmap towards Sprites.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 1:59:02 AM

Well, I do interpret this is step one towards a forthcoming post titled "Our Incredible Journey [with Fly Machines]"...

Whether that comes to pass depends on sprite uptake and so forth, but I believe it to be a lot more likely than I did a month ago. So, like I said, bummed, because fly is genuinely nice and I dislike using aws.

by x0x0

7/26/2026 at 2:02:50 AM

That's nice of you to say, and I appreciate it. I'd be sad in the event you're describing too! I spent a lot of time on Fly Machines (not nearly as much as JP and Peter, though).

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 2:44:36 AM

Could we not just forklift our fly thing to sprite I wonder (if it came down to that, that is) ?

by indigodaddy

7/25/2026 at 10:14:43 PM

No. Mu. Mu.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 2:25:51 PM

What they have to fix and focus is their reliability. I really liked how can you just spin up a docker container and then boom your application is li e But it would be down several times, and it was very pricy. Now I just have a vps.

by kelvinjps10

7/26/2026 at 5:22:24 PM

> What are we doing here? What’s going on?

Lol, did not expect a Tucker reference in my devex startup pivot blog post annoucement.

by rwz

7/26/2026 at 4:58:58 AM

Congrats!

Building a cloud like Fly is very difficult. Staying nimble through technology shifts is hard.

I’m right there with you on the agent computer shift. It’s forever changed how I code and deploy and architect systems.

Thanks for all the hard work, hosting, blogging and open source. Looking forward to what the next chapter brings us all.

by nzoschke

7/25/2026 at 11:50:08 PM

> 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.

by ai_critic

7/26/2026 at 1:31:40 AM

This is interesting. I’ve been building a project on top of sprites for the past few months, but I’ve often thought about moving off because it didn’t feel like fly was devoting enough attention to it. The changelog is sparse and their developer discord is kinda dead. So it’s good to hear they’ll be prioritizing it going forward

by bze12

7/26/2026 at 1:40:33 AM

If any fly people read this, could you please add the ability to create custom_api connectors to the api? Sprites are so close to being great for arbitrary secrets proxying. Right now you have to provision everything manually

by bze12

7/25/2026 at 10:15:28 PM

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

There's a world outside Apple.

by conradfr

7/25/2026 at 10:29:51 PM

Macs let you disable suspend just like (or possibly better) than any other operating system. The point being made is that it's the wrong tool for the job, precisely because of the user desired compromises made to create a great mobile computer.

by seemaze

7/25/2026 at 10:38:47 PM

Probably not great for the battery to be running all the time

by ozarkerD

7/25/2026 at 11:39:16 PM

Yeah exactly, I don't understand the trend of it to be honest. Buying a VPS (even a low end vps like 500mb ram or 1GB could be good) and you can use maki.sh (written in rust) as compared to opencode/claude-code etc. which I have had OOM errors with at low end vps's.

You can ssh into your vps's from anywhere and they could really work 24/7 without having to worry about battery or the whole opening mac up while moving because an agent is running thing.

by Imustaskforhelp

7/26/2026 at 11:50:05 AM

Love this. Maki.sh looks solid, will try!

by dexterlagan

7/25/2026 at 11:49:58 PM

maki.sh looks really interesting!

by indigodaddy

7/26/2026 at 6:02:23 AM

Where is that option?

by conradfr

7/25/2026 at 10:31:58 PM

Thanks to clamshell mode, mine doesn’t stop running

by throw03172019

7/25/2026 at 11:00:59 PM

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?

by losvedir

7/25/2026 at 10:42:23 PM

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.

by thenewguy077

7/26/2026 at 6:27:12 AM

Try https://shellbox.dev for a less expensive solution, real linux boxes that sping up in seconds and suspend resume as needed. Pay only for what you use

by messh

7/25/2026 at 10:28:52 PM

I did not know Theo had such influence on companies.

by melodyogonna

7/25/2026 at 11:35:52 PM

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.

by losvedir

7/25/2026 at 11:40:48 PM

Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing. Also remember these aren't really sandboxes per se, they're just computers/microvms. Exe also has a neat auth/https proxy that also does TLS/certs they have lots of cool tools and integrations.

by indigodaddy

7/26/2026 at 1:35:21 AM

I’ve been working on a project for this - https://mymachines.dev

It provisions a sprite and spins up Claude code/Codex on it for each session you create. Finishing up an iOS client for it too

by bze12

7/26/2026 at 5:16:41 AM

I really liked fly at first and still have some stuff running (still falling within free credits).

I was so excited for Sprites but I guess, I was not in the target audience because:

Sprites -- Stateful sandbox environments

Without SSH?

There were workarounds, yes.

by chanux

7/25/2026 at 11:14:37 PM

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.

by threecheese

7/26/2026 at 9:30:08 AM

Did not read past the manipulative attempt right at the start to make me read it.

"It's an honor thing". No, it really isn't, it's an entirely dishonorable approach to your potential reader.

by MattPalmer1086

7/26/2026 at 1:28:51 AM

> The dingo has truly eaten our baby.

It is so strange that people still say this. A family lost their child.

by holden_nelson

7/26/2026 at 1:30:20 AM

On this one point, if you really pin us down, you can get me to feel bad, but you know that this is a reference to a Seinfeld bit.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 2:51:07 AM

That seems a very strange claim that it's a reference to one minor use of a vastly larger tragic cultural phenomenon [1] without any other contextual indications that's the case?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo_ate_my_baby

by steerpike

7/26/2026 at 3:45:26 PM

I'm not dying on this hill. I punched up this post and that paragraph is mostly mine, and I'm telling you it's a random Seinfeld reference and not a joke about an actual tragedy, any more than me joking about the Andrea Doria would be. I'm not arguing with you about whether the actual event is something worth making fun of.

by tptacek

7/26/2026 at 3:57:07 AM

Filter bubbles and what not, but, googling the term only had Seinfeld show up on the bottom of the fourth page. Bottom of page 2 in a private tab.

by its-summertime

7/26/2026 at 11:43:18 AM

It’s a Buffy the vampire slayer reference and you know it.

by kasey_junk

7/26/2026 at 2:25:06 PM

I have never watched a single episode of Buffy (or of Star Trek The Next Generation, if Picard also said this.)

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 11:10:57 PM

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.

by mrcwinn

7/26/2026 at 4:49:32 AM

love his writing style. pure opposite of slop, oozing with humanity

by JeremyHerrman

7/26/2026 at 12:06:24 PM

I was about to write this. So refreshing, after having looked at hundreds of semi or completely AI-written articles. Even the news look like sterile Claude now. This is so human.

by dexterlagan

7/25/2026 at 9:44:59 PM

Is tptacek still over there? If so, thoughts?

by dyauspitr

7/25/2026 at 10:15:01 PM

Yep.

by tptacek

7/25/2026 at 10:27:14 PM

TIL (from this blog post) that "al" / "|||" / "Term-X" also works there.

Random 1990s nostalgia unlock.

by georgemcbay

7/25/2026 at 9:35:02 PM

Congrats on quitting!

by clint

7/25/2026 at 10:30:21 PM

I love that you've said this to me more than once.

by mrkurt

7/25/2026 at 10:02:20 PM

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.

by pizzafeelsright

7/25/2026 at 10:38:40 PM

Have they done bad work, lied, cheated, or stolen something?

by defrost

7/26/2026 at 5:37:10 PM

Lack being polite. It doesn't take much. Out of the mouth flows their heart.

by pizzafeelsright