--- title: "Turn And Face The Strange" url: https://daily.dev/posts/turn-and-face-the-strange-orqpdyoya source_url: https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites type: article source: "Fly.io" published: 2026-07-24T15:12:41.576Z updated: 2026-07-26T02:07:28.519Z tags: ["cloud", "ai-agents"] reading_time: 12 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Turn And Face The Strange **[Fly.io](https://daily.dev/sources/flydotio)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Fly.io founder Kurt Mackey announces major strategic changes: the company is pivoting to focus on 'Sprites' — ephemeral cloud computers designed specifically for AI coding agents — stepping back from its original PaaS identity. Mackey explains that AI agents have fundamentally changed software development, making traditional developer-focused cloud platforms less relevant. He introduces two new Sprite features: the Sprite Block Device (SBD) enabling drive forking and instant checkpoint-restore, and Connectors for secure authenticated requests without exposing credentials. Mackey also announces he is stepping down as CEO, handing the role to Scott Johnston (former Docker CEO), while raising a new funding round to support the agent-focused direction. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 132 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-26). **TL;DR:** HN commenters are broadly skeptical of Fly.io's pivot to Sprites as its primary product and the founder stepping down as CEO, citing longstanding reliability issues and doubts about the AI sandbox market; a large portion of the thread is consumed by heated debate over the tone of a prior fly.io blog post calling AI skeptics 'nuts'. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 35% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters who have built on Sprites note reliability has improved noticeably in the past two months. - Sprites' concept of hardware-isolated persistent Linux environments for running agents or arbitrary code is seen as a genuinely interesting abstraction. - A few current Fly.io users report the platform itself has become stable and reliable for their production workloads over time. **The pushback** - Multiple commenters report severe data loss, zombie states, and general bugginess with Sprites, calling it the buggiest infrastructure product they've used in decades. - Fly.io has a long history of frequent global outages with poor status-page transparency and slow support responses, which drove several users away. - The AI sandbox space is seen as a commodity already dominated by AWS and easily replicated on any VM/container provider, making the pivot questionable. - Commenters worry the existing Fly Machines/PaaS platform is being backburnered and may eventually be shut down, alarming current production users. - The founder pivoting the company's direction and immediately handing off the CEO role is seen as leaving the new CEO in a difficult position. - The aggressive tone of the 'You're all nuts' blog post on the company blog (rather than a personal blog) damaged trust and drove away potential customers. - Several commenters argue Fly.io simply needed to be a reliable Heroku clone and failed at that basic mission by prioritizing interesting engineering over ops. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): HN commenters are predominantly critical of the Sprites pivot and CEO transition, with recurring complaints about reliability, the AI sandbox market being a commodity, and the divisive tone of prior company communications. **Hottest debate:** Whether the 'You're all nuts' AI blog post was a justified and vindicated provocation or an unprofessional, tone-deaf piece that damaged Fly.io's reputation and alienated users. **Open questions** - Will Fly Machines and the existing PaaS platform truly be maintained long-term, or is this the first step toward shutting them down? - Can Sprites differentiate itself enough from AWS Lambda, Docker/Podman, and other VM providers to justify betting the company on it? - Will the new CEO Scott Johnston set his own direction, or is he inheriting a strategy he had no hand in shaping? - How will Fly.io handle ToS enforcement when Sprites are used to run unsafe or policy-violating code at scale? **Highlights** > As an elixir dev fly was a company I very much wanted to succeed but I twice had to leave them because they just never found the right balance between cool engineering and ops. For a long time they would have global outages where the status page would list everything as green and the only reason you'd know something was wrong was the forum threads. Their response was that they were too busy fixing the issues to update the status board. Right. Then once they finally started updating the board they would go several hours between updates with no indication of what was happing "Region x is down" then nothing, again "too busy fixing the issue". When they came out with paid support I signed up immediately only to find that it gave me an email address to contact support with fast responses promised but most of the time no one was monitoring it. I'd report large outages and not get back responses until the next day and on a few occasions I'd get back a response several days later being like "Can you explain the problem you're seeing?" No mate it was an outage several days ago. This would all just be annoying customer service if it was a rare occurrence but the reality of using them was that I was dealing with major outages almost monthly at points. If you scroll back through my post history here there were brief periods where stability would improve and I'd get optimistic about them only for it to crash back down to regular outages again days after I posted. I eventually had to move everything off them to self hosted again which is a pain but far less of a pain since my uptime is dramatically better(!) and when something breaks I know what it is. I still want fly to succeed but if you're going to host peoples stuff you need to accept responsibility and move budget to ops. Otherwise just kill the hosting entirely and try to become another HashiCorp. > — [sanswork on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052875) > Sprites are a beautiful place to make an abstraction. But I have never used a buggier infrastructure product in 30 years of development than when I tried sprites. Data loss left and right, sprites going into unconnectable zombie mode. Couldn't use even load snapshots because half the system seemed to think the sprite was fine, and half seemed to think it was dead. I gave up after two weeks of losing stuff over lunch or overnight or in the middle of working. I vividly remember scrolling through my terminal history, copy/pasting out work I could find to save from a dead sprite. I would guess that half or more of the sprites I launched had some kind of problem. Hope they get things stable. The concept is great. > — [danielvf on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052388) > The AI sandbox play also confuses me because (aside from the fractional pay-as-you-use billing) it's trivially implemented on top of any VM/container as a service provider. Given the reduced importance of data retention (the containers are disposable) and ability to redo work trivially you can even go a step further and have your agent spin it up on bare metal. Turns out agents spend most of their time waiting on GPUs so with memory dedup on your own similar workloads you can run "hundreds" of them on pretty minimal hardware. I also don't see how the cloud-for-agents will break the AWS monopoly: AWS already is the cloud for agents! As the article notes all the pain of using AWS is trivialized by agents (and IaC). To me the value now is in building the right tools for agents to make better decisions, not fighting for basis points on hardware margin in the orchestration or model serving layer. > — [ericpauley on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052707) > > Theo startled us, because we’re in the middle of a run of strong quarters that have included the best financial months in the company’s history. I don't know if it's worse that Kurt is taking some bozo Youtube devfluencer seriously, that he was surprised that there was doubt in the future of Fly (whose reliability--but not customer service!--has been a joke for years), or that they continue to prioritize interesting engineering over basic success. Bro, you just had to make a reasonable clone of Heroku. That's all you had to do. > — [ai\_critic on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053044) > This really sucks. I not only like fly a lot, I have two production apps; thousands in annual creds up for renewal soon; and some mildly embarrassing discussions about migrations to have. > — [x0x0 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052945) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051369) · 56 points · 126 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49037452) · 20 points · 6 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49043871) · 4 points · 0 comments --- Tags: [#cloud](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/turn-and-face-the-strange-orqpdyoya)