Turn And Face The Strange
fly.io
fly.io
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.
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.
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).
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.
Either way I wasn’t privy to the actual details, just that it was one of their gripes.
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.
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.
Mind giving a hint on another company name?
So it might be good the CEO is quitting because he has done a horrible job.
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.
Are you talking about AWS or Fly here? I seriously cannot tell.
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.
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
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.
Did Docker "blew the doors off the business"? Does he mean that in a Boeing sense?
[0] Some interesting remarks on it by Bryan Cantrill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460504
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 $70MM led by EQT Ventures.
Basically Scott Johnston is the guy that recoups money for investors, and in Docker's case, I recall that involved clawing back some value from users
From OP: As a shareholder of Fly.io, for this stage in Fly.io’s lifecycle, I liked his playbook better than mine. As the CEO of Fly.io, I liked the prospect of him doing all this work more than I liked the prospect of me doing it. We took a lot of time to work this out, and ultimately the board and I convinced him to take the job.
As a developer, I use docker/podman. Works great.
The new massive market that will open up, where grandma and grandpa are making apps, will be taken up by Lovable (and the like). Non-devs will not be using sprites.
You’re capturing some small percentage of existing developers.
If it's so easy to containerize these things then why aren't more devs doing it and these stories going away? I for one am actively avoiding the agentic coding switch because I have no interest in opening my home environment to a remote corporate LLM just to write code faster. But of course I'm missing out, as soon as I have more than one source file that I want my chat LLM to analyze in a single go.
As evidence, I point to the massive number of mostly-LLM-generated LLM-sandboxing projects. Practically every day, I see a new 100k+ LoC project to make agentic coding safe, with shiny emoji-and-badge-encrusted readmes...
... and no issues, no forks, and usually no new commits after the first two weeks. Try to use one and you'll quickly see they're all extremely bug-ridden (one of the few constants with LLM code). And some have stood the test of time and have ten thousand issues that are mostly regressions that were once fixed but come back every other week. But they keep popping up rapidly!
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fly.io
…/from?site=$domainThe 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.
Live and learn.
I remember feeling similarly after seeing so many people denying what had already changed.
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.
They really don't. You're clearly the intended audience for https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ !
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Going back to Jira (you may be right about Oracle but I doubt it) they are well position to ride the AI wave and do well. I gave reasons and details in my last comment. It is easy to slap on "AI pilled" baseball cap and use the same talking points. I'd love to hear specific arguments about why Jira is not well placed and I happy to change my mind (coffee mug extended out).
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
So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?
> [...] 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
There's a world outside Apple.
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.
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.
Whatever culture Kurt built for Fly, it was the wrong one.
Lol, did not expect a Tucker reference in my devex startup pivot blog post annoucement.
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
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.
It is so strange that people still say this. A family lost their child.
lol ok so I wasn’t deeply offended by the dingo reference for what it’s worth, but this attempt to distance yourself from it is weird. Both this post and Seinfeld are referencing the event directly.
And that’s fine with me, to be clear! I’m not clutching my pearls, I tend to have fairly edgy humor, not trying to put you on blast or die on this hill either, etc - I mostly just find it odd. Most companies, on their corporate blog, wouldn’t feel comfortable joking about most tragedies - would you make a similar quip about 9/11? Charlie Kirk? Casey Anthony? I’m guessing not. But the dingo thing is fair game. People say it without even considering it. What’s different? Genuinely asking
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.
"It's an honor thing". No, it really isn't, it's an entirely dishonorable approach to your potential reader.
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.
Transgressors are equated by you with thieves and frauds.
I'm strongly reminded of Piet Hein’s Circumscripture Grook.