I really hate that modern development means not having persistent disk. I’m glad there are new options coming out which let you do this in and easier way than managing my own EC2 instances!
This is needed for sandboxes if you don't want to throw them away and start over when something goes wrong.
With sprites.dev you can create an additional checkpoint and then turn Claude Code (or your preferred agent) loose to do anything. Even if it burns down the sandbox you can just restore a checkpoint in about a second.
1. Developer environment sandboxes. This is a cheap and convenient way to run Claude Code / Codex CLI / etc in YOLO mode in a persistent sandboxed VM with a restricted blast radius if something goes wrong.
2. Sandbox API. Fly now have a product that lets me make a simple JSON API call to run untrusted code in a new sandbox. There's even snapshotting support so I can roll back to a known state after running that code.
I wrote more a bunch more about this here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/
So let's say sprite is my building/dev ground floor. I get my thing/app to where I want it, but at the end of the day I think my thing/app is so awesome that it should be a production app for the whole world, and, I want to actually deploy it on fly, say.
Have you guys thought about that workflow, and what it might take to push button/migrate a sprite app over to fly?
Also, any plans for GPU sprites?
I don't think we're going to do anything new with GPUs any time soon.
Would I think of this as an EC2 instance which automatically and quickly scales to zero, with pricing only for resources consumed? (CPU and RAM when up, and disk all the time?)
It's a fast starting and fast pausing persistent VM, with a ton of built in developer tools (including a preconfigured Claude Code) and an extra JSON API for executing commands within it so you can treat it as a sandbox.
You may find my writeup here useful: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/
I've been thinking a lot about how to run agents (and skills) securely while giving them a lot of powerful capabilities.
I recently used their macaroons library to turn arbitrary API keys (e.g. for stripe's API) into macaroons. I route requests for an upstream host (like stripe) through Envoy as a mitm proxy which injects the real creds after verifying the macaroon.
It is such a powerful pattern. I'm always worried about leaking sensitive keys through prompt injection attacks (or just sending them to anthropic), but in this model you can attenuate the keys (both capabilities & validity window) client side. The Envoy proxy lives inside my flycast network so it can't be accessed externally.
It would be so cool if fly built something like this into sprites.dev (though I can see how it would be spooky to have fly install their own certs for stripe, etc...)
jmogly•7h ago
dmux•6h ago
>...I’m not entirely sure what that looks like yet, but things like this are a step in that direction.
This made me stop and think for a moment as to what this would look like as well. I'm having trouble finding it, but I think there was a post by Joe Armstrong (of Erlang) that talked about globally (as in across system boundaries, not global as in global variable) addressable functions?