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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

You're not wrong. The documentation actually had a hallucinated link to an Anthropic dependency in it when we shipped. Right now the attitude is mostly "if we have to document it extensively, we're doing something wrong". It's been in the works for awhile, with a small team, and we're just getting it out there right now.

I've been needling Kurt for several months now that if we wait until it's polished enough that we don't see comments like this, we're doing it wrong.

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For what it's worth, I evaluated Fly.io during a divorce from Heroku some time in mid 2022 (I think), found the platform was... way too rough around the edges at the time to want to migrate any real workloads. I kept it on my radar and shipped an MVP with it in 2024, found it was a lot more polished, and now have multiple production apps running there. I'm genuinely pumped about Sprites and have started building against the API—I did notice the weirdness with the docs, but you guys have been doing well on the "this thing that {was broken|I didn't like|was missing} now works the way I'd hoped it would" front.

Appreciate your perspective and totally understand that at some point you just have to ship it! From the outside it looks like a bit less time on XYZ feature and bit more time on marketing polish might have been a good call. But can only speculate what the trade offs were internally. Best of luck maturing the product!

The main things i think are missing is (1) how much am i spending and (2) why isn't my sprite paused, and (3) how can i get my stuff out (it would be nice to be able to mount in either direction or else integrate with git/git worktrees).

I ended up using it (and enjoying yolo mode!) but then my sprites weren't pausing and i was worried about spending too much so i deleted them.

I'm sure this is a difference-of-learning or whatever, but I'm usually unwilling to try a product until I can understand it and how it works from the documentation

Understandable. Our current take is that there's not really much to know, and that the people this will really light up are good with that. Of course, we'll flesh out documentation!

I'm really jazzed about this particular product as a product (I just really enjoy using it), but the post is mostly about how we built it, and deliberately not much about how best to use it.

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