Turn And Face The Strange

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Whatever culture Kurt built for Fly, it was the wrong one.

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.