Sprites are disposable cloud computers. They appear instantly, always include durable filesystems, and cost practically nothing when idle. They’re the best and safest place on the Internet to run agents and we want you to create dozens of them . Sprites are a place to run agents; the first thing you should think to…
We’re Fly.io, a public cloud platform that is both our favorite way to put an app on the Internet and our favorite way to safely let a frontier agent coding harness cook. This is a post about our company, the future, and Sprites, which are computers for agents that you can check out right now. This is a complicated…
Building agents is fun. Rebuilding agents that break themselves… less so. A lot of Fly people are building agents with less of a penchant for self destruction by teaching their agents to do anything risky in a Sprite. You get an agent that stays alive long enough to actually use its snazzy self improvement features,…
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here . Each time we write about it, we get a little bit better at golfing down a description of what Litestream is.…
We’re Fly.io, and this is the place in the post where we’d normally tell you that our job is to take your containers and run them on our own hardware all around the world. But last week, we launched Sprites , and they don’t work that way at all. Sprites are something new: Docker without Docker without Docker. This…
The state of the art in agent isolation is a read only sandbox. At Fly.io, we’ve been selling that story for years, and we’re calling it: ephemeral sandboxes are obsolete. Stop killing your sandboxes every time you use them. My argument won’t make sense without showing you something new we’ve built. We’re all adults…
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It’s free, open source software that should run anywhere, and you can read more about it here . Again with the sandwiches: assume we’ve got a SQLite database of sandwich ratings, and we’ve backed it up…
Some concepts are easy to grasp in the abstract. Boiling water: apply heat and wait. Others you really need to try. You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. There are big ideas in computing that are easy to get your head around. The AWS S3 API. It’s the most important storage…
Fly.io transmogrifies Docker containers into Fly Machines: micro VMs running on our own hardware all over the world. The hardest part of running this platform isn’t managing the servers, and it isn’t operating the network; it’s gluing those two things together. Several times a second, as customer CI/CD pipelines tear…
The $FLY Airdrop is live! Claim your share of the token powering Fly.io’s global network of 3M+ apps and (🤮) own a piece of the sky! We know. Our Twitter got owned. We knew within moments of it happening. We know exactly how it happened. Nothing was at risk other than our Twitter account (and one Fly.io employee’s…
I’m Ben Johnson, and I work on Litestream at Fly.io. Litestream makes it easy to build SQLite backed full stack applications with resilience to server failure. It’s open source, runs anywhere, and it’s easy to get started . Litestream is the missing backup/restore system for SQLite. It runs as a sidecar process in…
I’m an audiophile, which is a nice way to describe someone who spends their children’s college fund on equipment that yields no audible improvement in sound quality. As such, I refused to use wireless headphones for the longest time. The fun thing about wired headphones is when you forget they’re on and you stand up,…
Trust calibration is a concept from the world of human machine interaction design, one that is super relevant to AI software builders. Trust calibration is the practice of aligning the level of trust that users have in our products with its actual capabilities. If we build things that our users trust too blindly, we…
Recently, I suggested that The Future Isn’t Model Agnostic , that it’s better to pick one model that works for your project and build around it, rather than engineering for model flexibility. If you buy that, you also have to acknowledge how important comprehensive model evaluation becomes. Benchmarks tell us almost…
Your users don’t care that your AI project is model agnostic. In my last project, I spent countless hours ensuring that the LLMs running my services could be swapped out as easily as possible. I couldn’t touch a device with an internet connection without hearing about the latest benchmark breaking model and it felt…
