Fresh Reads

execonnect is a way to let your exe.dev VMs connect to HTTP services, even if those services aren’t on the public internet. You run execonnect on the machine hosting the service (or on any machine that can access the service), and this establishes a link between your service and…

exe.dev integrations let you store secrets with exe.dev’s control plane so your VMs (and the agents on those VMs) can access services without seeing the secrets themselves. The next step is to avoid having the secret to begin with. When exe.dev and the other service both support…

When it comes to LLMs, context rules everything around us. An agent loop is inherently quadratic: messages accumulate and every iteration you send the full stack of messages to the model. That stack of messages is the context, and it starts with a system prompt, descriptions of…

If you’re looking for bugs, you’ll get better results if you focus the agents’ attention. The usual loop is roughly: for f in files: "please look for important bugs, using $f as a starting point" But I've found this to be more effective: for c in commits: "please analyze $c for…

Without the Internet, agents are useless. With the Internet, they're dangerous. One approach is to allow Internet access, but through carefully controlled sippy straws. Let through only requests to destinations that you trust and deny all of the rest. exe now makes this easy.…

When I look at a new agent, I break it down by focusing on its topology. An agent is three things: A model. Your model choice defines the agent’s “smarts,” i.e., which tasks it can accomplish. The agentic loop (see: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of an LLM Agent Loop with Tool).…

Maybe it's the years we spent on Zoom? San Francisco seems hungry for in-person events, and we're no exception. We're hosting our first technical meetup for developers on Monday, October 26, from 6 to 9pm at the Sentry office in San Francisco. The question of the evening: Are we…

When I want to improve one of my iOS apps, I shake my phone, type in a prompt, and off it goes to Shelley, together with a screenshot! Iteration (culture) is eating planning (strategy) for lunch. I'm finding that grinding down the friction, even as minimal as getting myself to…

Snacking—focusing on small, shippable tasks that make the product better but don’t necessarily help it grow—is addictive. Sometimes your main project is a slog. Why not take a break and fix something? You get that sense of accomplishment and suddenly your main project feels less…

The other day I was doing some ops work, live migrating some VMs from one physical host to another, as we sometimes need to do. This process is nearly transparent (except a pause) to our users, but I wanted an extra set of “attention heads” on it, so I built shoulder (as in…

Modern processors have multiple CPU cores, and the physical CPU cores in turn have two logical CPU cores. The latter permit the physical core to run two independent programs simultaneously, an approach known as hyper-threading. Hyper-threading uses CPU resources more…

When your browser reads this blog, it looks up blog.exe.dev using DNS, and sends an HTTP request with a Host: blog.exe.dev header to our servers. Our anycast network receives the request and uses Host: blog.exe.dev to figure out which of all the exe VMs to proxy your request to.…

At a conference last week, I sat through a bunch of software factory demos, and they were all about task management. Kanban boards, Slack interfaces, email interfaces, dependency graphs, ticketing, graphical interfaces, you name it. Why is everyone building task management and…

Shelley learned a new trick recently: instead of typing a prompt, you can record both your speech and your window (or screen). Once you stop recording, Shelley puts together the transcript and the matching video, and hands that off as the prompt to the agent. You have to see…

At exe, one of the things we pride ourselves on is developing strong primitives instead of throwing features at the wall. We still believe that the VM is a key primitive in our system. Everything is just a computer and you get to choose how you use it. We’ve encouraged you all…

On Wednesday, the air in San Francisco smelled like smoke. I pulled up PurpleAir and the Bay Area Air Quality District and sure enough, the AQI was up in certain parts of the city. It looked like a local fire of some kind. I wanted to see what was going on, so I spun up a new VM…

At exe.dev, we use integrations to connect your VMs to other services securely and simply. Usually this takes the form of a proxy that injects secrets. We love hearing from our customers (hint, hint, email us, don’t be shy), and one of them was doing significant gymnastics to…

The other day, I built a boring bot that could tell me whether the model list in our LLM gateway was out of sync with one of our LLM providers. We deploy frequently enough that doing this dynamically has not been a priority, but it’s good to know when it’s time to update things.…

A few months ago, I wrote about how AI is disrupting the build-vs-buy equation in SaaS. I argued that the real value of SaaS over most DIY software is knowing what good looks like. But a few recent events have made me realize that knowing in and of itself is not enough. “Good”…

It’s no longer news that AI agents have gotten very good at programming very quickly. LLM chatbots, on the other hand, haven’t improved all that much in the past year. Why is that? While I don’t work on building AI agents, it’s generally acknowledged that the programming…

Earlier this week I caught myself copy/pasting code between two agents. I don’t want to be a meat proxy, but it really was going to be best if they just…talked to each other. And yet it was weirdly hard to arrange that. So I summoned Mayfly Chat. There’s not much to it. It…

exe.dev has one API, which looks like a CLI, but it can be used over multiple transports. You can run commands over SSH or send those same commands over HTTPS to https://exe.dev/exec. This extends to running commands on your VMs! # Generate a token using your SSH key. (You can…

At exe, we collect a lot of telemetry about how our system performs. We use Grafana, Prometheus, and we have all sorts of graphs and alerts. This is great, but it doesn’t say much about what’s happening on the financial side of the business—the churn rate, ARR. Those are things…

Story time. I had a fun idea for an LLM eval benchmark. It’s still a work-in-progress, but if it turns out to be interesting, I promise I’ll share it. Fable was merrily prototyping it for me. I checked in, and saw this: [The model declined to continue this request. Retrying the…