Random 1990s nostalgia unlock.
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).
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.
There's a world outside Apple.
> 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.
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.
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.)
The message is fine, but it was a weird choice to have it on fly.io instead of a personal blog
These people will be eating their hat soon if they aren't already.
subarctic•2h ago
jagged-chisel•1h ago
subarctic•1h ago
hedgehog•1h ago
dyauspitr•58m ago
rileymichael•53m ago
[1] https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/
satvikpendem•50m ago
simonw•46m ago
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.
dijksterhuis•35m ago
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.
enraged_camel•53m ago
tptacek•32m ago
rdtsc•21m ago
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.