Code And Let Live
5 points by teymour
5 points by teymour
State management is hard, and having a nice "agentic workflow" suffers from it as well. But am I reading this right, they are starting a firecracker thingy for agents to solve this? So not like EC2, but more like ECS?
My first impression is that that doesn't sound sustainable? But I'd also rather see this solved at a level more similar to the BEAM/WASM or other runtimes.
But when it comes to sandboxing agents I'm going to guess this is more than enough for plenty of people.
Wanted to try this out but it looks like you can only access it via their cli, which you can only get from some install.sh that gets a binary from their servers. There appears to be no web interface or similar other than for creating access tokens.
I tried to check their github and I couldn't find the source for the CLI to install it myself.
So it might be proprietary?
The quick start example on the landing page shows how to use the CLI by default, but there are buttons at the top that let you toggle between other options, including just using the REST API with curl.
After you sign up, or sign in with an existing fly.io account, there's a "Manage Account" button at the top of the page that gives you a dashboard which includes creating access tokens.
I've only toyed around with it in passing, but I'm pleasantly surprised so far. I'm waiting on the technical details promised next week.
Is this the resurgence of image based development such as Smalltalk style?
Will be interesting to see what the UX for version control will be (which is essentially state-management with the state being the revision of the code). I found that challenging with Smalltalk. When everything is mutable it's hard to reason how your system ended up in the state its in.
What's going to be interesting is how to make this kind of setup secure. With readonly ephemeral instances it's harder for malware to persist. With millions of persistent machines running untrusted code generated by ai agents on behalf of non-technical users I'm afraid we will see a similar pattern like all the pwnd WordPress instances running on classic shared web hosting with outdated PHP versions. The best we can do about this is probably strict sandboxing and some kind of IDS monitoring the sandbox from the outside for unusual behavior.