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 [...]
exe.dev
Posts
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 🔗
.wiki-hero { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; gap: 12px; margin: 2em 0; } .wiki-hero-panel { text-align: cente [...]
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? By [...]
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 [...]