Run a Slack Bot from Your VM (Without Giving It the Keys) 🔗
You can now interact with your VM on Slack. We store your Slack credentials outside your VM so you don’t have to worry about agents running amok (inci [...]
exe.dev
Posts
Customizing Shelley, Customizing Software 🔗
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How Antithesis Turned exe into a Sandbox for Agentic Software Tests 🔗
Carl Sverre spends a lot of time thinking about how to give AI agents the right amount of power. Give them too little, and they can’t do real work. Gi [...]
Claude Is Not a Compiler 🔗
In early 2025, I wrote Is Claude a Compiler? At the time, my answer was: I don’t know. I’m now pretty sure the answer is “no, that’s a category error, [...]
Meet the Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data Into a Video Game 🔗
There’s a grass fire burning behind Raffael Hickisch when we speak on a video call on Tuesday. He’s not worried—fires like this are part of everyday l [...]
Building Software From My Phone 🔗
My little town of San Anselmo has a delightful live music concert series in the summer. What they don’t have is a website that is easy to read on my p [...]
Connect Your ChatGPT Subscription to exe.dev 🔗
We're pleased to announce that you can connect your ChatGPT subscription to exe.dev and use our coding agent Shelley with the OpenAI models you're alr [...]
Adding Features Without Interrupting Network Connections 🔗
A busy network People use exe.dev to build and run programs on virtual machines. For virtual machines that are serving web traffic, we handle encrypti [...]
Building the exe.dev iOS App 🔗
If you haven't checked out our app yet, it's in the App Store. We blogged about it the other day. Once we decided in one of our Tuesday in-person meet [...]
Announcing the exe.dev iOS App 🔗
We're delighted to announce that exe.dev has an iOS app now in the App Store. There's a lot to write about how we built it, but today let's talk about [...]
Sharing Is Caring 🔗
Today's quiz is to deploy a server-rendered hello world app (python3 -mhttp.server fine for these purposes, though I used Go below), publically visibl [...]
Replace Your CI With a Merge Queue 🔗
The standard in CI today is tests run in the cloud after a commit has been merged. They serve as a double-check for an engineer: did you forget to tes [...]
Dev, Test, Prod: Choose One, Two, or Three 🔗
Industry-wide, we often develop our software in three distinct environments. Perhaps your laptop is a Mac; your CI system is hosted GitHub Actions, an [...]
Series A for exe.dev 🔗
We have raised a Series A, for a total of $35m in funding. We are using it to build a new generation of cloud infrastructure. Major investors are Ampl [...]
Some Secret Management Belongs in Your HTTP Proxy 🔗
Secrets management is a pain. Larger organizations commit to centralizing secrets management in a service. When done well, these services solve a lot [...]
Closer Compute 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇯🇵 🇩🇪 🇦🇺 🔗
When you use a computer for development, latency matters. Even if you typically hang out in a remote-connected editor over sshfs (like Visual Studio), [...]
A Transparent UI Pattern 🔗
exe.dev has one API: it's the command you would write in the exe.dev lobby. For example, share add island-anchor "philip+demo2@bold.dev" shares the HT [...]
Prompt Engineering Is Dead, but Claude Still Tries 🔗
A year ago, Claude was better at prompting than I was. Not any more. Coding agents have gotten dramatically better. Good prompting used to require car [...]
Everyone Is Building a Software Factory 🔗
We are all grappling with what it means to be an organization with agentic tools. We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of workflows in how to produce so [...]
February Update 🔗
February kept us busy! Thanks to all our users for the great feedback, so many bug fixes and quick improvements were possible because of high quality [...]
APIs for the RESTless 🔗
Exe.dev's API to create a new machine is: ssh exe.dev new --name=restless --json That assumes your SSH key is already registered to your account. If y [...]
Why exe.dev VMs Are Persistent 🔗
When we were designing exe.dev, we settled on VMs being persistent, with persistent disks. VMs are not “quiesced” when there’s no network traffic or S [...]
Show, Don’t Tell 🔗
I have been tasked, by process of elimination, with developing exe.dev’s marketing strategy. In one very important sense, marketing exe.dev is easy. I [...]
Review the Reviews 🔗
When I was actively contributing to the Go project, my primary feed was the code review email firehose. Issues, mailing lists, and Slack had low SNR. [...]
Software as Wiki, Mutable Software 🔗
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January Update 🔗
It has been a busy month for exe.dev! We launched in late December and have been hard at work keeping the service online. Along the way we found some [...]
Expensively Quadratic: the LLM Agent Cost Curve 🔗
main { max-width: 900px; } Pop quiz: at what point in the context length of a coding agent are cached reads costing you half of the next API call? [...]
Your Codebase Is the Prompt 🔗
When Claude writes code I don't like, I used to mutter: "Oh Claude, what did you do?" I now ask instead: "Claude, what did you see?" And then I go add [...]
SSH Has No Host Header 🔗
We have a challenge with ssh. Every VM has a standard URL that we use for both HTTPS and SSH, e.g. undefined-behavior.exe.xyz. Just as you can type th [...]
Talk Emoji to Me 🔗
Start-ups sprout ad hoc processes constantly. I've noticed an emerging theme among ours at exe.dev: emoji reactions are a great way to communicate wit [...]
Goodbye Sketch, Hello Shelley! 🔗
Shelley is exe.dev's coding agent. The name refers to the Unix shell, since it's good at operating the shell tool, and, yes, it shares a name with the [...]
Meet exe.dev, Modern VMs 🔗
Today we are going public with the developer preview of exe.dev, a new VM hosting service. We will keep the service open for new users as long as our [...]