Exe.dev - Hacker News

Posted by achairapart 12/26/2025

Exe.dev(exe.dev)

https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev

https://exe.dev/docs/how-exedev-works

https://exe.dev/docs/pricing

457 points | 297 commentspage 6

bhavaniravi 12/27/2025||

Are there any fundamental differences between E2B and this?

crawshaw 12/27/2025|

Hello, exe.dev person here.

I have not used E2B (though I really like their web site), though it looks like there are quite a few differences. Our disks are persistent (without manual snapshotting), we have a TLS proxy by default with built-in auth and link sharing.

It also looks like they have many features we do not have (yet).

I believe the target use is also quite different. You can use exe.dev VMs for running your agent. But you can also use it for hosting your site. E.g. blog.exe.dev is an exe.dev VM.

bhavaniravi 12/27/2025||

Thanks for the response. In the "How exe works" page, it's mentioned that exe runs on bare metal with Kata containers, how is it different from firecracker? Were there any advantages?

crawshaw 12/27/2025||

The mention of Kata is out of date, we are fixing that, thanks! Our underlying VMM is very similar to firecracker (same upstream source). We believe our advantages are in how we run it. Several blog posts are in the works about technical details!

drakmail 12/27/2025||

I really like the experience, after being a stuck I just tried to ssh from my termux on phone and it really worked! Absolutely awesome

rubslopes 12/27/2025||

That's brilliant UX. I was vibe coding a webpage in minutes, and I could immediately check the results.

bkyan 12/28/2025||

Is it possible to use a ChatGPT subscription with the bundled Codex CLI or do we have to use an API key?

Alifatisk 12/27/2025||

> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks

aleksandrm 12/27/2025||

Thanks, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. The front page is just... not helpful. Given the amount of pushbash how everyone feels about this, it should be removed from HN frontpage!

satiric 12/27/2025||

Thanks. I feel like I expect home pages to contain at least a modicum of information. And three seconds spent thinking about accessibility would have told them that light gray links on a white background are a terrible idea...

crawshaw 12/27/2025||

Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and docs, but far needs to be written.

(We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)

mcny 12/27/2025||

The blog doesn't work on Firefox on Android for me

https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev

Secure Connection Failed

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

crawshaw 12/27/2025|||

I just tried this out in Firefox on macOS and there are no issues, so this might have something to do with our LetsEncrypt wildcard cert and the CA roots installed on Android. Could you tell me what version of Android you are using?

mcny 12/27/2025||

Moto g stylus 2025 - Android 15 - metro by T-Mobile stock os

Firefox nightly

148.01a

I'll check for updates

Edit: still broken

148.0a1 (Build #2016134322), 757b8230f44e4152aeb7b9031ff95219471ab993 GV: 148.0a1-20251226204324 AS: 148.20251224050247 OS: Android 15

Edit: also same on OnePlus Nord N30

147.0b7 (Build #2016133535), 455e50920c4926534376b719df4cf1ed714bc61d GV: 147.0-20251222164020 AS: 147.0 OS: Android 14

integralid 12/27/2025||

Works fine to me too. Looks like you're the only person that reports that. Are you sure this is not something on your end?

What TLS error do you get? Untrusted CA?

esseph 12/27/2025|||

Works fine on Firefox/Android here

mcny 12/27/2025||

https://blog.exe.dev/

I am not sure. I even tried Google Chrome

This site can’t provide a secure connection blog.exe.dev sent an invalid response. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

https://i.imgur.com/HOwb7g3.jpeg

also tried mozilla firefox on desktop

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to blog.exe.dev. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.

Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

ssl labs says everything is fine

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blog.exe.dev

bstsb 12/27/2025||

try another network. i often get SSL errors due to false positives in my internet provider's "virus protection"

mcny 12/28/2025||

Wow, spectrum is really terrible

For anyone else like me, you can read the article at

https://archive.ph/j57V7

cekanoni 12/27/2025||

very cool idea and concept :)

some feedback:

No matter what i do, i can't ssh into VM that i created Local terminal; always timeout built in terminal; SSH handshake failed: ssh: handshake failed: EOF

shelley agent seems to be install, but it always shows isn't running.

wildrhythms 12/27/2025|

Likewise. I think it might be experiencing a hug of death :)

danecjensen 12/27/2025||

Should I still be trying Sketch.dev, or is this just the better version of it?

crawshaw 12/27/2025|

[exe.dev co-founder here] This grew out of our work on sketch. We built a container-based system for it, and found ourselves saying "I wish we just had a computer." This is our answer to that.

If you are interested in our work and agents, I would suggest trying Shelley, the little agent we have in exe.dev. There has been some discussion about what to do with sketch on its discord channel, but we won't be putting energy into it going forward.

(A blog post with far more details is in the works.)

engr 12/27/2025||

I just tried this, genuinely groundbreaking! So quick to spin a VM and get going

killerstorm 12/27/2025|

Hmm, looking through how-exedev-works, it seems like what you call VM is more like a container, i.e. it doesn't run its own kernel?

Sort of a container which "feels like" a VM? Reminds me of Virtuozzo / OpenVZ VM approach which was popular ~20 years ago when RAM was expensive...

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