Also curious about Shelley, their LLM agent. Turns out it makes requests to a proxy for https://fireworks.ai APIs via http://169.254.169.254/gateway/llm, such as:

    POST /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1
    Host: 169.254.169.254
    User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
    Content-Length: 491 
    Accept: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer implicit
    Content-Type: application/json
    Accept-Encoding: gzip

    {"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Generate a short, descriptive slug (2-6 words, lowercase, hyphen-separated) for a conversation that starts with this user message:\n\nhello\n\nThe slug should:\n- Be concise and descriptive\n- Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens\n- Capture the main topic or intent\n- Be suitable as a filename or URL path\n\nRespond with only the slug, nothing else."}],"max_tokens":8192}

And, perhaps of more interest, actual conversations which start with the system prompt:

    POST /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1
    Host: 169.254.169.254
    User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
    Content-Length: 10513
    Accept: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer implicit
    Content-Type: application/json
    Accept-Encoding: gzip
    
    {"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct","messages":[{"role":"system","content":"You are Shelley, a coding agent and assistant. You are an experienced software engineer and architect. You communicate with brevity.\n\nYou have access to a variety of tools to get your job done. Be persistent and creative.\n\n
    ...

Truncated as it's huge, but here's a copy of the request data: https://victory-george.exe.xyz. Interesting to see the range of tools offered by the agent.

Turns out the request is coming from localhost because it's being forwarded over SSH. Their HTTP proxy causes a new SSH connection to be made to the VM:

    Connection from 10.42.0.1 port 37456 on 10.42.1.75 port 22 rdomain ""              
    debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_9.9                                   
    debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version Go                    
    debug1: compat_banner: no match: Go

Which then requests a local TCP connection, in this case to port 8000:

    debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2.                                    
    debug1: server_init_dispatch                                                       
    debug3: receive packet: type 90                                                    
    debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype direct-tcpip rchan 0 win 2097152 max 32768
    debug1: server_request_direct_tcpip: originator 0.0.0.0 port 0, target 127.0.0.1 port 8000
    debug1: connect_next: start for host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000)                  
    debug2: fd 7 setting O_NONBLOCK                                                    
    debug2: fd 7 setting TCP_NODELAY                                                   
    debug1: connect_next: connect host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000) in progress, fd=7
    debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK                                                           
    debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK                                                          
    debug1: channel 0: new direct-tcpip [direct-tcpip] (inactive timeout: 0)           
    debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm direct-tcpip                         
    debug3: channel 0: waiting for connection

This is in contrast to a normal SSH shell session:

    debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2.                                     
    debug1: server_init_dispatch                                                       
    debug3: receive packet: type 90                                                     
    debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype session rchan 0 win 2097152 max 32768
    debug1: input_session_request                                                      
    debug1: channel 0: new session [server-session] (inactive timeout: 0)
    debug2: session_new: allocate (allocated 0 max 10)                                 
    debug3: session_unused: session id 0 unused                                          
    debug1: session_new: session 0                                                      
    debug1: session_open: channel 0                                                    
    debug1: session_open: session 0: link with channel 0                               
    debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm session                                 
    debug3: send packet: type 91                                                        
    debug3: receive packet: type 98                                                    
    debug1: server_input_channel_req: channel 0 request pty-req reply 1
    debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0                                    
    debug1: session_input_channel_req: session 0 req pty-req                           
    debug1: Allocating pty.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Gen z often says 'I need a sudo access'.

No, it's a reference to the OpenSSH one.

Hardly, you can use .ssh/config to configure an SSH key just for this service.

It is a paid service, delivering a valuable developer tool, and which indeed uses ssh keys for authentication.

So, exactly what you said, but for the benefit of the user, and for the profit of the company, by offering an excellent product.

(I am a happy customer of their previous product, Sketch.dev.)