Orbs | Hacker News Reader

Orbs

ampcode.com

116 pointstosh43 comments

So this product is a thin wrapper over a remote virtual machine, a new name for remote virtual machines, and an exhortation to not look inside or reason about remote virtual machines?

I feel like up until recently this would been pitched as “the missing UX/DX for cloud compute”, or something. But instead now it’s marketed to this new trend where one should aggressively not understand the tower of abstractions one is standing on. Odd.

This is Apple's entire business model.

Also most proprietary software, also most web-based software, also most APIs... also what my plumber does when I call him over!

(Also most hardware?)

I suppose it is only a new trend in engineering, not in the broader world.

Simulacra and simulation.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> I have a few qualms with this app:

> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software

Obviously I'm not claiming that this will be anywhere near as successful as the iPod or Dropbox. It might not succeed at all. But I would have thought we'd be past this sort of dismissal by now.

I kept reading (I mean scanning) to see if it uses orb stack[1] locally.

[1] https://orbstack.dev/

Hey! Author of the post here. Sounds like I failed my mission with the post then :)

Yes, like many things, Orbs are "wrappers" around VMs, but the point is that some wrappers enable new ways to hold and use and reuse the thing they wrap, and even give you a different perspective on it.

That's what happened with our team once we had Orbs working. We knew beforehand all the things they're made of (fast to start sandboxes, scale to zero, live streaming updates on all clients, one machine per conversation, etc) but what really surprised us was how it changed our workflow by removing friction we didn't even know was there. The friction of creating new checkouts and worktrees and managing local resources -- it sounds trite, of course, but man, once you can stop thinking about it, it's so much better.

So, yes, maybe they're wrappers but hey, some people say the tortilla is what makes it a burrito, you know?

I get it. You need to market. But it helps us all if you do your homework on terminology and prior art. For example, I assume you aren't referring to an object request broker, a music streaming service, an older open router system for blocking spam, etc.

I haven't paid super close attention to Orbs, but I also build an agent runtime + orchestration layer on top of remote VMs (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika). I do think it's smart marketing to name the concept. And for coding agents, there's a lot of annoying fiddly stuff you have to do to get the experience to work well:

    1. auto-refresh base VM snapshots with latest delta of git commit changes
    2. extend the VM lifetime when it receives an interaction (chat, HTTP request, etc.) and sleep it when inactive
    3. oauth refresh of MCP servers, coding agent subscriptions, etc.
    4. support inter-VM and communication for agents and exec commands
    5. keeping track of agent work across VMs

That said, I think it's important to not hide the VM and computer from the agents. The user should have total control to put 1 or more agents on a VM, to make VMs ephemeral or permanent, to manage the network access of VMs, etc. It's basically a networking + VM scheduling problem, for which there's a ton of prior art since the 90s (or earlier).

A few examples:

Many remote agents products have a "one agent per VM" restriction, but it's better to have N agents across M VMs. For example, I have agents work on a singular VM in parallel worktrees and then stack the worktrees at the end on that VM for the final change.

Just give me OpenSSH with normal SSH key management. Lets you manage VM access the same way we've done it since the 90s.

Connect VMs in a network topology: we build our VM/agent scheduling + remote control product inside itself, so we often test interactions between user, control plane, and sandbox(es). If you can directly control VM creation and lifecycle, it's easy to spin this structure up and let agents work across it.

I should be able to use whichever coding agents I want, connected to the VM. Whether that's OpenCode or Pi Web in the browser, or loading the VM into Cursor or Codex app, or using the TUI or sending messages to agent(s) via API.

I think very soon big LLM providers (OpenAI et. al.) will provide a service like this. With the LLMs becoming faster, the agentic task completion bottleneck will soon move to the tool calls (both execution time and round-trip latency), so it makes sense to have a server host the project very close to the actual LLM doing the inference in order to minimize latency.

Anthropic has Claude Code Web -- sorry, looks like the official name is "Claude Code on the web" -- which I think is basically this? I've been using it for a while and I really like it.

Nothing to do with latency, I think, it's all about convenience and safety. I don't have to worry about running an agent on the computer that knows all my admin API tokens and SSH keys, and the agent isn't interrupted if I close my laptop.

The one thing that might be useful is the ability to run on a beefier machine when you need it, e.g. make sure it has direct access to a GPU. But then you're back to thinking about the host VM, not fully abstracting away from it.

OpenAI already does this with Codex cloud

https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud

From my experience, Orbs have been more consistent, along with Cursor's agents

Also, they can literally train the LLM inside the VM they create so it becomes an expert in whatever tools are there. And since they control the entire sandbox, less permission issues are likely.

I think they will become extremely vertical integrated sooner or later because that will be the most efficient and effective way to do this. I'm guessing anyone building this kind of thing now has only one hope: acquisition.

They've basically come up with what exe.dev has been doing for awhile now?

Except, exe.dev is more about, you have a VM and can do LLM work on it. Orbs seems to be minimizing the VM machinery more and making it about the "agentic experience."

A bunch of people are in this space. I have my own personal cloud stack.

Care to share more about how/what you built?

Can anyone name a non-threatening orb? All the orbs are can think of are decidedly palantir-like - ostensibly useful, but corrupted by dark magics...

In Spyro 2 you collect orbs to activate the portal to defeat the evil wizard guy.

There’s nothing threatening about Little Fluffy Clouds.

How do you feel about a huge ever growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraverse?

Depends, what colour is it?

Reminds me of fly.io's sprites (https://sprites.dev), but with a custom-built layer of UI, harness, and features.

It sounds like great engineering, but everyone in the coding agent space is building the same thing. And big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have more money to burn. Cloud agents that run in VMs are being offered from everyone from VPS and infra companies to the frontier labs.

Yep, and also at the same pricing, so then why not go for established providers?

Well they nailed the headline: make the reader go "wtf is Orbs" so they have to click on it.

Wtf is Orbs?

A brand name for an agent in VM they spin up for you.

Thanks! Saved me (and hopefully others) a click.

Same thing as:

- "Cloud Agents" on cursor

- "Cloud Coding Agents" on Hoplite.sh

- "Sessions" in Devin cloud (they don't make a big deal of them being remote)

Amp is just trying to pitch an increasingly-commodity experience as a special sauce.

I’ve used a few of the hosted VM options for this like Coder and really dislike having to do my work in a web browser.

This is why I made ParaSpace (https://paraspace.dev/)

With ParaSpace I can use a real terminal and my normal tooling to develop locally on fast booting isolated containers. I even get to bring my own dotfiles.

We all seem to be building this kind of Orbs or whatever you want to call a harness with some user interface.

I am at version 4 and I have a “open in vscode” button on each task/orb/instance just in case the UI is not enough and you want to corner the agent really close

To give another perspective from the generally negative comments here, I've found Orbs to be just fantastic! The "it's just a VM, everybody has that" argument misses the point, the real value lies in just how easy it is to use and the surrounding functionality. Portals, multiplayer, local machine syncing, Puck (something like a meta assistant), referencing threads/Orbs from each other, etc. all just work as you'd hope and expect.

It's the best $20/month I'm spending on any dev tools, the Amp coding agent in itself is worth that much (I actually came for that and stayed for the orbs). I can only encourage anyone to give it a try and maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised :)

For you not to waste your precious time - "orb" is just a virtual machine. And the thing requires a phone number, which it tells you at the END of the registration. I have new marketing jingle for that company: "market your AI slop with non-AI slop".

I enjoyed the demo vids and seeing the way these VMs are implemented.

>requires a phone number…at the END of the registration

I do not appreciate that at all. Phone number, understandable, but it better be all the way up front.

I am on the Amp team. I just turned off SMS verification. Not needed anymore. Was required for ~5% of signups for anti-abuse, but I think we're good without it now.

:D wow nice thanks

So Orbs are like Grok Bots, I guess? Now every company has to copy this feature, and name it differently

Im pretty sure Orbs were released before Grok Bot.

Also Grok Bot is incidentally just a wrapper for cursor cloud sessions/vm's

Feels like the tech industry balks at any whimsical introduction of feature names. Reminds me of Tangled’s spindles and knots and HN’s reaction.

They’re just names to be used within the context of their parent ecosystem. If it were a general purpose tool, I’d tend to agree.

This is ChatGPT Work, right?

enshittification all rolled up into a... Pokemon?

A pokeball!

I apologize, was not conversant with all the Pokestuff. Yes, then a Pokeball has captured Mr. Hanky.

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