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Posted by usrme 2 days ago

Code and Let Live(fly.io)
https://sprites.dev/
437 points | 171 commentspage 5
obsoleetorr 1 day ago||
something simpler I've did, in the same spirit: LXC containers (using Incus) in a VM. LXC containers look and feel like VMs, but are very lightweight. And the VM they all run in provide the hard sandbox.

and when I spin up a new LXC container cloud-init sets it up with the agents and my repos inside

adastra22 1 day ago||
> Stop killing your sandboxes every time you use them.

Fo people do this? I’ve never heard of it.

memset 1 day ago||
Could you clarify what this actually is?

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?)

simonw 1 day ago|
Yeah that's about right.

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/

nextaccountic 1 day ago||
How exactly can code agents make use of this? You install claude code inside a Sprite and run it there? Do you also need to put all your codebase in this sprite?
tptacek 1 day ago||
Claude Code is already in the Sprite; just create one and type "claude". But they have an API and Claude (or Gemini or Codex) can use them remotely too. They're disposable computers. Use them however you want.
indigodaddy 22 hours ago||
Will you guys get mad if I try to do something like transcription with a tiny model on a sprite?
hashim-warren 1 day ago||
You can use git to pull down code from a remote repo
indigodaddy 2 days ago||
So this is neat and useful and I think will/should get traction.

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?

tptacek 1 day ago|
It depends on which Fly person you talk to. If you talk to Kurt he'll try to sell you on his crazy dream of how all software is going to be malleable and "prod" doesn't mean anything anymore. If you ask me: tell Claude to make a Dockerfile of the current state of your Sprite, and then deploy it as a Fly Machine. It's a good question, and we're working out how the transition from Sprite to Fly Machine works, but that's how I'd do it today.

I don't think we're going to do anything new with GPUs any time soon.

rco8786 12 hours ago||
This is cool but like...a docker container running locally works fine too?
ksclk 18 hours ago||
Does cron work (wake up the vm) there?
mbm 1 day ago||
This is amazing. Great job Fly team!
mbm 22 hours ago|
Hmm, so even just doing a simple ls -la on the home dir is occasionally taking ~10s. Other times, it's instant (I'm on a stable 1 Gbps connection).

Have been experiencing intermittent connection drops as well.

jamietanna 1 day ago|
Unsure if it's an intended typo: `rm -rf $HMOE/bin`
CGamesPlay 1 day ago|
I ran the command to check and it erased /bin and now my sprite is busted. But I was able to restore from a checkpoint and it's all good.
mrkurt 1 day ago||
Intended typo so you can see restore happen ;)
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