Naming a linux vm service after the Microsoft executable file format was certainly a choice. As for usefullness, it's not something I could see myself using. Setting up a vm in azure/gcp/aws etc....
Naming a linux vm service after the Microsoft executable file format was certainly a choice.
As for usefullness, it's not something I could see myself using.
Setting up a vm in azure/gcp/aws etc. and installing a coding agent is trivial to the point where I don't see the business case outside of hobbyists.
To their credit though, banishing the coding agent to a vm is not a bad idea.
I think a future where coding agents are given complete free rein over a VM - full root, no permission checks, etc. - but where the FS is automatically versioned in step with the AI log is a good...
I think a future where coding agents are given complete free rein over a VM - full root, no permission checks, etc. - but where the FS is automatically versioned in step with the AI log is a good evolution over the status quo. It’s annoying to have to keep an eye on what it’s doing. That kind of defeats the purpose of deferring effort to the AI.
This is a new service (in "alpha" status) for creating Linux virtual machines, which can do whatever you like. here's their announcement post. It's free for now, but they plan to charge $20 a...
This is a new service (in "alpha" status) for creating Linux virtual machines, which can do whatever you like. here's their announcement post.
It's free for now, but they plan to charge $20 a month. The interesting bit is that they automatically install a coding agent for you in the VM. I'm not sure there's anything all that groundbreaking here, but it seems nicely done and I was curious enough to actually try vibe-coding something.
The UI is rather minimal. Signing up is easy; it just requires an email. You can create a passkey or continue to sign in using email.
Once you're signed in, you can create a VM. There is a "description" field where you can optionally describe what you want your VM to do. The coding agent automatically starts up and starts building whatever you asked for.
So I asked it this:
Make a minimal website where I can share links, listed in reverse chronological order. Each link has a URL, title, and one-line summary. When I paste in a link, automatically download the page. Automatically choose the title and summary using an LLM.
And so it wrote me a little website in Go, using sqlite for the database. I can talk to the coding agent in a web browser by connecting to port 9999.
It didn't get it right the first time. I had to ask for some corrections. Also, the part where it calls out to an LLM to choose a description didn't work, so I told it to take that out and put in an edit button. But a few minutes later, I had a dumb little link-sharing website at https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/.
There are no tests and it's just editing the live site. The initial website was committed to git (locally, in the VM), but any changes you ask for won't be committed unless you ask. I haven't bothered to upload it to github.
To make it public for everyone else to see, I had to ssh to exe.dev and run 'share set-public skybrian-links'. The coding agent can't do this, but it can tell you what to do.
Here's a post by one of the developers about how they asked it to create a shopping list app while in the grocery store.
I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out: They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for...
I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out:
They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for $20/month, that all share the same quota on RAM and disk.
Looks like Digital Ocean droplets start at $4 / month, which is more than I'd want to pay for a barely used app that I nontheless still want to leave running. That seems appealing to me since I've been dabbling with free tiers for various services (like Deno Deploy), but it doesn't give me a Linux VM.
So I guess it's for developers who want a lot of tiny VM's.
Other than that, they hope to offer a better developer experience. For example, when you create a personal website, authentication is already set up so only you can access it.
This is interesting, but maybe not for obvious reasons. It feels like a vibe coding project. I should say in advance that this is entirely a guess, I have no evidence and I only spent a few...
This is interesting, but maybe not for obvious reasons. It feels like a vibe coding project. I should say in advance that this is entirely a guess, I have no evidence and I only spent a few minutes with the site (on mobile with no easy access to the source code). But I see a lot of AI tells. If I'm wrong about that, apologies to the author for my assumptions.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this sort of vibecoding, I don't exactly love it but I'm not going to judge people for using the available tools to try stuff. The reason it's worth bothering to mention at all is that I've been seeing a lot more of this lately, and I expect we'll see MUCH more in the future: projects that wouldn't be worth the time to build without an AI to do a lot of the work. But with one a lot more people are going to say "why not?"
I could be wrong about that too, maybe there's a market for this I'm not seeing, maybe it was worth building. But $20/month for a VPS with many of the features missing? It's a hard sell. You can get a bigger VPS with all the features and run as many "virtual machines" as you could ever need for less money. The site says the target audience is developers, but those are exactly the people who have no use for this. It solves problems that are too trivial to be called problems. Maybe there's a niche among non-developers who don't want the hassle, but the truth is a SOTA agent can tell you exactly how to spin up a solution like this from scratch in a pretty short time. It can do much of the work too. It can tell you where to get a dedicated server with enough resources to power more than enough "virtual machines" to cover the server cost with plenty of profit on top.
I suspect that's exactly what happened here, and it's a capability that has very recently become available to almost anyone. The funny, or maybe creepy, part is that if you're using AI to ideate and explore market potential, in addition to code, it will tell you, in various ways, throughout the process, that it's genius. That you're creating something world class and production ready. The only mystery is that no one has done this yet. They just lacked your unique combination of insight and vision.
It's a wild new paradigm. The famous LLM sycophancy is toned down in some of the more recent releases but it's still there under the surface, enthusiastically waiting for its chance if you give it any reason.
I'm not even sure it's a bad thing, at least in this context. It feels like a bad thing because I have particular views about software quality but assuming that people don't spend money they can't afford to lose, the worst case is that they trade some time for knowledge. Even if you have the AI do most (read: too much) of the work, you'll still learn a lot.
Well actually I suppose the worst case is that the AI creates a security nightmare without you realizing it and you convince people to use it and then have a data breach. Sadly not as bad as it sounds given how commonplace data breaches are these days. There aren't many name/email combinations out there that haven't been in a data breach. Not to mention the data brokers have it already, breach or not.
Anyway I'm just fascinated by the ways development is changing and this looks like a really good example of one of the ways
In my experience every AI company is full of people that fully drink the koolaid and use AI for as much as is possible. Assume every AI startup has vibe-coded internals.
In my experience every AI company is full of people that fully drink the koolaid and use AI for as much as is possible. Assume every AI startup has vibe-coded internals.
This is an alpha release that got some attention before they were ready, so it’s like judging a game before it’s done. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it for now and come back in three...
This is an alpha release that got some attention before they were ready, so it’s like judging a game before it’s done. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it for now and come back in three months to see what they have.
What are some good alternatives for cheap VM’s with similar specs?
The exe.dev folks have open sourced their coding agent. It's a Go program and looks like it would run in any Linux VM. Note that it assumes you're running in a VM for security; the agent itself...
The exe.dev folks have open sourced their coding agent. It's a Go program and looks like it would run in any Linux VM.
Note that it assumes you're running in a VM for security; the agent itself doesn't have any restrictions on what shell commands it can run. It also doesn't do authorization itself, so I assume you would need to put an HTTP proxy in front if you want to access it remotely. It doesn't have any install instructions, though I imagine a coding agent wouldn't find it hard to write some.
I clicked over to this expecting to be unimpressed, but it's actually a pretty cool concept once you read through the docs a bit! It actually reminds me of Google Cloud Run and company (there's...
I clicked over to this expecting to be unimpressed, but it's actually a pretty cool concept once you read through the docs a bit! It actually reminds me of Google Cloud Run and company (there's overlap but they are obviously not the same thing), in the sense that you can spin something up with very little friction. The fact that this thing can handle auth for you is a nice bonus! It reminds me of https://lmno.lol but for hosting small web apps.
Naming a linux vm service after the Microsoft executable file format was certainly a choice.
As for usefullness, it's not something I could see myself using.
Setting up a vm in azure/gcp/aws etc. and installing a coding agent is trivial to the point where I don't see the business case outside of hobbyists.
To their credit though, banishing the coding agent to a vm is not a bad idea.
I think a future where coding agents are given complete free rein over a VM - full root, no permission checks, etc. - but where the FS is automatically versioned in step with the AI log is a good evolution over the status quo. It’s annoying to have to keep an eye on what it’s doing. That kind of defeats the purpose of deferring effort to the AI.
This is a new service (in "alpha" status) for creating Linux virtual machines, which can do whatever you like. here's their announcement post.
It's free for now, but they plan to charge $20 a month. The interesting bit is that they automatically install a coding agent for you in the VM. I'm not sure there's anything all that groundbreaking here, but it seems nicely done and I was curious enough to actually try vibe-coding something.
The UI is rather minimal. Signing up is easy; it just requires an email. You can create a passkey or continue to sign in using email.
Once you're signed in, you can create a VM. There is a "description" field where you can optionally describe what you want your VM to do. The coding agent automatically starts up and starts building whatever you asked for.
So I asked it this:
And so it wrote me a little website in Go, using sqlite for the database. I can talk to the coding agent in a web browser by connecting to port 9999.
It didn't get it right the first time. I had to ask for some corrections. Also, the part where it calls out to an LLM to choose a description didn't work, so I told it to take that out and put in an edit button. But a few minutes later, I had a dumb little link-sharing website at https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/.
There are no tests and it's just editing the live site. The initial website was committed to git (locally, in the VM), but any changes you ask for won't be committed unless you ask. I haven't bothered to upload it to github.
To make it public for everyone else to see, I had to ssh to exe.dev and run 'share set-public skybrian-links'. The coding agent can't do this, but it can tell you what to do.
Here's a post by one of the developers about how they asked it to create a shopping list app while in the grocery store.
Maybe I don’t understand, but how is this different from a VPS?
Or if it’s another VPS, is there a significant advantage vs. DigitalOcean or Hetzner?
I'm not sure it is any better, but here's what I figured out:
They're still in alpha and not charging money yet, but on their pricing page, they say they will let you have up to 25 VM's for $20/month, that all share the same quota on RAM and disk.
Looks like Digital Ocean droplets start at $4 / month, which is more than I'd want to pay for a barely used app that I nontheless still want to leave running. That seems appealing to me since I've been dabbling with free tiers for various services (like Deno Deploy), but it doesn't give me a Linux VM.
So I guess it's for developers who want a lot of tiny VM's.
Other than that, they hope to offer a better developer experience. For example, when you create a personal website, authentication is already set up so only you can access it.
This is interesting, but maybe not for obvious reasons. It feels like a vibe coding project. I should say in advance that this is entirely a guess, I have no evidence and I only spent a few minutes with the site (on mobile with no easy access to the source code). But I see a lot of AI tells. If I'm wrong about that, apologies to the author for my assumptions.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this sort of vibecoding, I don't exactly love it but I'm not going to judge people for using the available tools to try stuff. The reason it's worth bothering to mention at all is that I've been seeing a lot more of this lately, and I expect we'll see MUCH more in the future: projects that wouldn't be worth the time to build without an AI to do a lot of the work. But with one a lot more people are going to say "why not?"
I could be wrong about that too, maybe there's a market for this I'm not seeing, maybe it was worth building. But $20/month for a VPS with many of the features missing? It's a hard sell. You can get a bigger VPS with all the features and run as many "virtual machines" as you could ever need for less money. The site says the target audience is developers, but those are exactly the people who have no use for this. It solves problems that are too trivial to be called problems. Maybe there's a niche among non-developers who don't want the hassle, but the truth is a SOTA agent can tell you exactly how to spin up a solution like this from scratch in a pretty short time. It can do much of the work too. It can tell you where to get a dedicated server with enough resources to power more than enough "virtual machines" to cover the server cost with plenty of profit on top.
I suspect that's exactly what happened here, and it's a capability that has very recently become available to almost anyone. The funny, or maybe creepy, part is that if you're using AI to ideate and explore market potential, in addition to code, it will tell you, in various ways, throughout the process, that it's genius. That you're creating something world class and production ready. The only mystery is that no one has done this yet. They just lacked your unique combination of insight and vision.
It's a wild new paradigm. The famous LLM sycophancy is toned down in some of the more recent releases but it's still there under the surface, enthusiastically waiting for its chance if you give it any reason.
I'm not even sure it's a bad thing, at least in this context. It feels like a bad thing because I have particular views about software quality but assuming that people don't spend money they can't afford to lose, the worst case is that they trade some time for knowledge. Even if you have the AI do most (read: too much) of the work, you'll still learn a lot.
Well actually I suppose the worst case is that the AI creates a security nightmare without you realizing it and you convince people to use it and then have a data breach. Sadly not as bad as it sounds given how commonplace data breaches are these days. There aren't many name/email combinations out there that haven't been in a data breach. Not to mention the data brokers have it already, breach or not.
Anyway I'm just fascinated by the ways development is changing and this looks like a really good example of one of the ways
In my experience every AI company is full of people that fully drink the koolaid and use AI for as much as is possible. Assume every AI startup has vibe-coded internals.
This is an alpha release that got some attention before they were ready, so it’s like judging a game before it’s done. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it for now and come back in three months to see what they have.
What are some good alternatives for cheap VM’s with similar specs?
The exe.dev folks have open sourced their coding agent. It's a Go program and looks like it would run in any Linux VM.
Note that it assumes you're running in a VM for security; the agent itself doesn't have any restrictions on what shell commands it can run. It also doesn't do authorization itself, so I assume you would need to put an HTTP proxy in front if you want to access it remotely. It doesn't have any install instructions, though I imagine a coding agent wouldn't find it hard to write some.
https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley
I clicked over to this expecting to be unimpressed, but it's actually a pretty cool concept once you read through the docs a bit! It actually reminds me of Google Cloud Run and company (there's overlap but they are obviously not the same thing), in the sense that you can spin something up with very little friction. The fact that this thing can handle auth for you is a nice bonus! It reminds me of https://lmno.lol but for hosting small web apps.
I see that exe.dev went invite-only. If anyone needs one, let me know.
🤮🤮🤮