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 [...]
exe.dev
Posts
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, shares the HTTP server for the VM island-anchor to that e-ma [...]
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: That assumes your SSH key is already registered to your account. If you want to do it over HTTPS, it's: Our [...]
Why exe.dev VMs are persistent 🔗
When we were designing , we settled on VMs being persistent, with persistent disks. VMs are “quiesced” when there’s no network traffic or SSH connect [...]
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 email firehose.code review 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. . Just as you can type the domain into a web browse [...]
Talk emoji to me 🔗
Start-ups sprout ad hoc processes constantly. I've noticed an emerging theme among ours at : emoji reactions are a great way to communicate with bots. [...]
Goodbye Sketch, Hello Shelley! 🔗
Shelley is '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 poet P [...]
Meet exe.dev, modern VMs 🔗
Today we are going public with the developer preview of , a new VM hosting service. We will keep the service open for new users as long as our capacit [...]