>...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?
As I understand it Unison tries to do something like that but that might be wrong.
Then read Simon Willison's breakdown and got the 'Aha!'.
I like what they've done, played with it and immediately started to plan how I'd try to implement it myself.
I guess this will be the way to go, for development setups instead of using a dedicated machine. Especially when mobile clients are created for Sprites.
My libvirt setup does this right now, I have a little dumb cli I wrote that lets me create, start, stop, save, restore, and destroy preconfigured machines. I use it for testing provisioning scripts and playbooks. You get the full cloud experience by including a cloud-init ISO so you can ssh to it the moment it boots with my key. Didn't realize I was at the frontier of computing paradigms.
Don't get me wrong the interface fly has is super nice but it feels like the endgame isn't remote hosted computers but a nice user-friendly interface (i.e. what docker did) but it's for persistent local VMs.
What I've been waiting for, for a long time. Basically the thing you need if you want agents to run freely but still in a safe way kinda.
>For reasons we’ll get into when we write up how we built these things, you wouldn’t want to ship an app to millions of people on a Sprite. But most apps don’t want to serve millions of people. The most important day-to-day apps disproportionately won’t have million-person audiences.
I appreciate a lot this vision of personal computing.
I'll give sprites a try, they sound super cool.
Additionally, is Tailscale/Wireguard connectivity something you'd consider?
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.
We realize that is not going to cover all the business cases we have been discussing with customers and plan to introduce a snapshot concept (in particular for rewinding the state of a VM to an automatic backup), but we have a lot of FS work underway before we can launch it. There are some other things we want out of our VMs that we cannot do using conventional cloud techniques, so we have code to write.
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!