Sprites are a beautiful place to make an abstraction.
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.
> We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.
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.
Whenever I start to use fly.io they have outages all the time. And also I think they are a bit pricey too. I stopped using them, they have unreliable infra.
Saw this on my RSS feed and was surprised to see it hasn't been discussed yet on HN - fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads, but I had to go back over a year to find anything from them with more than a handful of comments. I guess they've become less relevant on here since they stopped allowing new users to host apps for free?
What do you mean? We ran a big post about Litestream Writeable VFS just a couple months ago, and we've had several big posts over the last 12 months, including the Sprite launch. We got pretty busy, and there's a lot going on, and I am a bottleneck on big posts going up on the blog. We have a couple months of technical catching up to do. But it's not like we've vanished off HN.
> fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads
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.
Oh ok i thought they charged a flat fee to use the platform now but maybe that was a temporary thing. My account is a few years old so i wouldn't know, i still have a few apps running on the smallest vm size and it's always under $5
Good discussion on the HN thread about that article. To be honest, based on the latest models and agentic engineering, that blog post is definitely right. It's not 2023, 2024, or 2025 anymore, agents have gotten a lot better.
I think the effect was less about it being correct or not, but instead more about if fly.io would treat humans as first class users compared to agents or not in the future.
The message is fine, but it was a weird choice to have it on fly.io instead of a personal blog
It's just marketing, going with the times of lots of vibe coders now suddenly wanting to put something on the Internet. I wouldn't read too much into it as a fundamental philosophy.
It's right in the point it brings up that modern LLMs are serious engineering and quite a bit capable at many tasks. It's not correct on the rest where Ptacek appears dismissive because 'he doesn't wanna hear' about copyright and other things, maybe we chalk it up to an upset guy at people he believes and maybe knows are wrong and ignore the rest of the spiel, but I won't.
Yeah, I think that post from June 2025 has aged pretty well. The Coding Agent revolution hadn't really happened at that point (Claude Code was only ~4 months old) so the paraphrased message "this stuff is actually useful for programming, saying it's all just stochastic parrots misses the mark" was still non-obvious to a whole lot of people.
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.
The title was the point of the post. I have acquaintances who are still sore at me about it. But the problem wasn't that people disagreed with me about LLMs; the problem was that we were locked in an unproductive and static equilibrium of people talking past each other and hedging their way out of any direct, empirical confrontation over what was happening.
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.)
Indeed, it's not worth engaging with AI skeptics anymore today, it's just a waste of time. If they don't see the value then they probably never will, and that's not my problem.
This is what I mean about the static equilibrium in 2025. That's what everyone was doing: just writing the other side off. That post of mine did a lot of things, but it did not do that.
> Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title.
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.
I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI". I wish I could tell you I've come to see the error of my ways, but I continue not to care about it.
The CEO didn't write that article. I did. I was going to run it on my personal blog, and he asked me to run it there. Be mad at him for the right reason.
It's probably getting less discussion because there's less user energy, the existing VM / database product has clearly not been a top focus for a while and in any case that business is becoming even more of a tough commodity for the reasons the post points out.
I think they became less relevant, at least amongst human users, when they hit a particularly rough patch with awful reliability issues a couple of years back. At least that's when my own social circle and loose constellation of developer acquaintances started saying "we should probably avoid Fly.io".
No one talks about new software anymore. All the conversation is meta about LLMs that write software instead. This is a dead career, I’m just waiting for the LLMs to start writing code in binary.
I don't think these sprites are worth betting the company on, but I guess that will be for the new CEO to decide.
> 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.
Yuk I don't want to rent my appartment from my drug dealer. I love I can say thanks for the code Claude now fuck you I am deploying it (waggles finger in westerly direction...) there.
Sprites are about more than just providing an environment for Claude Code et al to run code in. They're also useful for anyone who's building their own product that needs an inexpensive way to execute unsafe code.
Yeah that seems like a weird way to end an article that includes this paragraph:
> 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.
Well, there's doing both in terms of focus and effort, basically treating them as peer products. And then there is doing both in terms of "keeping the lights on for one, and focusing on the other".
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).
Macs let you disable suspend just like (or possibly better) than any other operating system. The point being made is that it's the wrong tool for the job, precisely because of the user desired compromises made to create a great mobile computer.
Well, fuck. ... we raised a fuckload of money and didn’t need more. And if we fail, we fail with our full asses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
The 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.)
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.
These people will be eating their hat soon if they aren't already.
> 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?
> 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).
There's a world outside Apple.
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.
Random 1990s nostalgia unlock.