Our Best Customers Are Now Robots | Hacker News Reader

Our Best Customers Are Now Robots

fly.io

30 pointskiwicopple10 comments

> But on a modern cloud platform, there’s really no reason to permanently grant Sam Altman Google Mail access, even if you want his robots to sort your inbox. You can decouple access to your mail spool from persistent access to your account by tokenizing your OAuth tokens, so the LLM gets a placeholder token that a hardware-isolated, robot-free Fly Machine can substitute on the fly for a real one.

This kind of isolation is nice. Next logical step would be some way to prevent Fly from having access to the tokens.

I don't fully get this The whole point of OAuth tokens is that they're not permanent access. Just revoke it if you need to.

My summary of the post would be "LLMs have drastically increased demand for remote dev environments, making that business seemingly better than container hosting."

I also feel like calling the LLMs "Robots" is needlessly confusing. "AI" or "Agent" would have been more fitting.

"I also feel like calling the LLMs "Robots" is needlessly confusing. "AI" or "Agent" would have been more fitting."

They are just computer programs.

Why on earth is IT so bereft of creativity that it needs to invoke "robot". Robot is derived from a Czech word for forced labour or even slave. These things don't go "diddly diddly deep" like Twiggy, nor whatever R2D2 beeps. They are certainly not physical, which is attribute one for a "robot" (it's a thing not a non thing).

If you replace the word robot with the word wankery, the article really starts to make sense. When you encounter various declensions and conjugations and so on, be careful to keep it real.

For better or worse, describing software this way is fairly standard usage - e.g. robots.txt.

robots.txt is famously ignored by many ... agents ... out of pure spite.

That's a human thing.

It's semantics though, as pedantic as you want to be "robot" got the meaning of automatons in general, physical or virtual.

The best UX/DX has so many things that also make it good for LLMs. We’re talking great docs, loads of feedback, predictability, structure, maturity, easy backtracking, and a huge community pumping info on to platforms like Stack Overflow.

fly.io should keep building great UX because robots will evolve in a direction of behaving more like humans - for example with more and more browser use.

The main area of divergence that’s emerged so far is auth (mentioned) & no doubt there’ll be others but it’s still 99% overlapping.

Making things nice for humans also makes it easier to audit your agent’s actions later.

To the folks at fly.io - don’t take focus off the UX/DX because it’s a decent chunk of the RX. And because we love it.

> adds systemd units (robots understand systemd; it’s how they’re going to replace us).

Indeed, is it kind of joke which is not joke from Fly.io perspective? Humans who have learned CS for 5 years and can create JIT compilers cannot understand systemd?

On the other hand, I'm still in a shock after realizing that you can't expect Frontend dev guy will be able to clearly explain which CORS headers and values they do need - they just keep saying "CORS not working, fix infrastructure!" and not learning MDN by heart.

* Fly.io dabs GPT-Brand Vibe Coder Attractant behind its ear.

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