{"slug": "exe-dev", "name": "exe.dev", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "Hosted Linux microVMs with SSH access, an HTTPS proxy, and a built-in coding agent.", "recommenders": 14, "commenters": 19, "warners": 0, "score": 11.704, "rising": -2.25, "first": "2025-12-23", "latest": "2026-10-08", "why": "Liked for cloud VMs that come up in about a second with SSH and the built-in Shelley coding agent, and for a flat monthly fee that covers many always-on VMs.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 22, "neutral": 6, "compare": 3, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 5, 2, 1, 1, 4, 0, 2, 4, 1, 2, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Shelley agent", "Agent sandboxes"], "caveat": "No outbound firewall", "short_quote": "They have a coding agent called Shelley (https://exe.dev/shelley) that works fine in a web browser on my laptop, tablet, and phone.", "icon": true, "domain": "exe.dev", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://exe.dev", "pricing": "paid", "aliases": ["exe.dev", "Shelley", "shelley"], "verdict": [{"text": "Liked for cloud VMs that come up in about a second with SSH and the built-in Shelley coding agent,", "cites": [{"id": 782307312, "item_id": 48894207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894207", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second", "excerpt": "We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop. The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM. exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built i", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud sandboxes for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers"}, {"id": 742371344, "item_id": 46398209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398209", "by": "twotwotwo", "date": "2025-12-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd use it.", "excerpt": "So I tried this the other day after fellow Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it recently. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and can spin up cloud stuff--it's not like I didn't have computing resources already. I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) ", "context": "Go developer", "use_case": "quick disposable public VMs for projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exe.dev/"}, {"id": 744615344, "item_id": 46538459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538459", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating", "excerpt": "Used Shelley to write a little guestbook late at night in bed from my phone! Was a fun experience. Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating, assessing the state of the things & groking what I was talking about. All zero friction. I had signed up for an https://exe.dev account to play around, check out their neat VM offering. I didn't know Shell", "context": "", "use_case": "building a guestbook from phone", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shelley: A Coding Agent for Exe.dev"}]}, {"text": " and for a flat monthly fee that covers many always-on VMs.", "cites": [{"id": 800207344, "item_id": 50012959, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012959", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev looked like a nice way to try it out.", "excerpt": "I have 11 VM\u2019s running on exe.dev for $20/month. There\u2019s one I use every day for my links website [1] and the rest are mostly-idle development machines. One of them has the git worktree and preview website for a static website that\u2019s hosted on Netlify. [2] Checking out a git repo in a Linux VM and hosting prod elsewhere (automatically deployed via a push to GitHub) seems like a nice pattern. Since exe.dev doesn\u2019t cha", "context": "started using coding agents in December", "use_case": "development VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 766033872, "item_id": 47877117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877117", "by": "dbmikus", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute", "excerpt": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute and then can split it up into as many VMs as I want. I use exe.dev to run little vibe-coded apps and it's nice to just leave them running without a spend meter ticking up. We're thinking about switching to this pricing model for our own startup[1] (we run sandboxed coding agents for dev teams). We run on Daytona right now for sandboxes.", "context": "", "use_case": "running vibe-coded apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}]}, {"text": " Complaints are rare; one commenter notes it lacks an outbound firewall,", "cites": [{"id": 787848723, "item_id": 49240545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49240545", "by": "rusch", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "compare", "quote": "https://exe.dev/ would be perfect but it does not come with outbound firewall.", "excerpt": "The login is annoying but, lacking an open source alternative, this has been my daily driver for a while now because it works great out of the box with two key features: outbound firewall and secret injection with placeholders. I run it with superset and then each git worktree is mounted in a sandbox that is configured for each repo i work in. Closest open source I have seen is https://earendil-works.github.io/gondol", "context": "", "use_case": "agent sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker Sandboxes \u2013 Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"}]}, {"text": " and another points out the VMs are plain microVMs rather than true sandboxes.", "cites": [{"id": 784847552, "item_id": 49052972, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052972", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing.", "excerpt": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing. Also remember these aren't really sandboxes per se, they're just computers/microvms. Exe also has a neat auth/https proxy that also does TLS/certs they have lots of cool tools and integrations.", "context": "", "use_case": "persistent sandboxed Linux VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fly.io CEO Kurt Mackey is stepping down"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Shelley agent", "summary": "The bundled Shelley coding agent and its web UI write and test apps with little friction.", "quotes": [{"id": 744615344, "item_id": 46538459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538459", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating", "excerpt": "Used Shelley to write a little guestbook late at night in bed from my phone! Was a fun experience. Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating, assessing the state of the things & groking what I was talking about. All zero friction. I had signed up for an https://exe.dev account to play around, check out their neat VM offering. I didn't know Shell", "context": "", "use_case": "building a guestbook from phone", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shelley: A Coding Agent for Exe.dev"}, {"id": 741874001, "item_id": 46367125, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367125", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2025-12-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give it a try, it is jaw dropping.", "excerpt": "As an experiment, I gave the source zip file to Claude and told it to make a WASM version of the app, by translating the Pascal to Go. It nailed it, first try. I cannot, unfortunately, share a link to the website it created because of the license. LLM translations of historical software to modern platforms is a solved problem. Try it, you'll see. I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give i", "context": "", "use_case": "driving Claude for code porting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (2013)"}, {"id": 742412656, "item_id": 46400791, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400791", "by": "dependency_2x", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Love the coding agent web ui.", "excerpt": "Nice one. Love the coding agent web ui. I used https://temp-mail.org as I didn't want to use a real email. Enjoy my creation https://love-storm.exe.xyz:8001", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent VM hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exe.dev/"}]}, {"label": "Agent sandboxes", "summary": "Used as remote machines for running coding agents away from the user's laptop.", "quotes": [{"id": 782307312, "item_id": 48894207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894207", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second", "excerpt": "We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop. The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM. exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built i", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud sandboxes for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers"}, {"id": 781759217, "item_id": 48859951, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859951", "by": "chadash", "date": "2026-07-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i love exe.dev", "excerpt": "i use vim quite a bit! I find that in this new era, i'm in the command line a lot and like to stay in the command line. vim (I use neovim) is a good way to do that. Furthermore, a lot of my workflow is now done on remote servers (i love exe.dev) where claude code is sandboxed to an extent (it can still cause damage, just not to my main computer's file system). When I'm configuring those, i have a setup script that in", "context": "works mostly on remote servers", "use_case": "remote servers for sandboxed Claude Code", "switched_from": "", "story": "How do you use Vim in the era of AI?"}, {"id": 744148928, "item_id": 46509308, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509308", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2026-01-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as Steve (with a better UI).", "excerpt": "You're old fashioned, and that's ok, if it's ok with you. But when high level languages were getting started, we had to read and debug the the transformed lower level output they made (hello C-front). At a certain point, most of us stopped debugging the layer below and most LLVM IR and assembly flow by without anyone reading it. I use https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as", "context": "", "use_case": "orchestrating coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Welcome to Gas Town"}]}, {"label": "Fast setup", "summary": "New VMs are quick to start, isolated, disposable, and reachable on the public internet.", "quotes": [{"id": 742371344, "item_id": 46398209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398209", "by": "twotwotwo", "date": "2025-12-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd use it.", "excerpt": "So I tried this the other day after fellow Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it recently. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and can spin up cloud stuff--it's not like I didn't have computing resources already. I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) ", "context": "Go developer", "use_case": "quick disposable public VMs for projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exe.dev/"}, {"id": 782307312, "item_id": 48894207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894207", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second", "excerpt": "We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop. The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM. exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built i", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud sandboxes for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers"}, {"id": 775878304, "item_id": 48492394, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492394", "by": "eigencoder", "date": "2026-06-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been using `exe.dev` lately", "excerpt": "Yeah, I think this will really be a thing. I have been using `exe.dev` lately, and I was at an AirBnB with my family where we wanted to play a game, but it needed pencil and paper for each person, but we didn't have those. I thought it would be nice to have a little web app where you could write your input and then vote on other people's responses directly from your phone. I just spun up a VM on exe.dev, asked the AI", "context": "", "use_case": "spinning up VMs for AI-built apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"}]}, {"label": "Flat pricing", "summary": "A fixed monthly fee can be split across many VMs that stay running at no extra cost.", "quotes": [{"id": 800207344, "item_id": 50012959, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012959", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev looked like a nice way to try it out.", "excerpt": "I have 11 VM\u2019s running on exe.dev for $20/month. There\u2019s one I use every day for my links website [1] and the rest are mostly-idle development machines. One of them has the git worktree and preview website for a static website that\u2019s hosted on Netlify. [2] Checking out a git repo in a Linux VM and hosting prod elsewhere (automatically deployed via a push to GitHub) seems like a nice pattern. Since exe.dev doesn\u2019t cha", "context": "started using coding agents in December", "use_case": "development VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 766033872, "item_id": 47877117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877117", "by": "dbmikus", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute", "excerpt": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute and then can split it up into as many VMs as I want. I use exe.dev to run little vibe-coded apps and it's nice to just leave them running without a spend meter ticking up. We're thinking about switching to this pricing model for our own startup[1] (we run sandboxed coding agents for dev teams). We run on Daytona right now for sandboxes.", "context": "", "use_case": "running vibe-coded apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 766035665, "item_id": 47877229, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877229", "by": "pclark", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Exe.dev seems like a good middleground where I can allocate the compute from tiny to large.", "excerpt": "I think I am interested in this? I run a bunch of small web apps, currently as fly.io machines. I love fly, but it adds up when I have a bunch of small things that I want isolated \u2014 I wish I could have even smaller Fly instances. Exe.dev seems like a good middleground where I can allocate the compute from tiny to large. (?)", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting small web apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}]}, {"label": "Phone access", "summary": "Commenters check on agents or SSH in from phones and browsers.", "quotes": [{"id": 795694304, "item_id": 49730894, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730894", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-09-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change", "excerpt": "I'm retired and write code as a hobby, not presentations or docs, but it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change. I will have a conversation with the AI, then say \"Please go ahead\" and close my laptop to do something else. Since I use web browsers exclusively for this, I can check on its progress from my phone, tablet, or laptop. (They have iOS and Android apps too, but I've never bothered to install them.)", "context": "retired, writes code as a hobby", "use_case": "AI-assisted code changes from browser", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"}, {"id": 766018560, "item_id": 47876160, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876160", "by": "schpet", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone", "excerpt": "as an exe customer i'm really happy to see this. i don't even use half of their features (such as the https proxy, or the LLM agent) but it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone. i use hetzner too in the same way for a bit of redundancy but exe seems less likely to delete all my machines and data. every time i've had an issue or question, it's been the same sympathetic people helping ", "context": "exe customer", "use_case": "remote machine via ssh", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 744615344, "item_id": 46538459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538459", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating", "excerpt": "Used Shelley to write a little guestbook late at night in bed from my phone! Was a fun experience. Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating, assessing the state of the things & groking what I was talking about. All zero friction. I had signed up for an https://exe.dev account to play around, check out their neat VM offering. I didn't know Shell", "context": "", "use_case": "building a guestbook from phone", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shelley: A Coding Agent for Exe.dev"}]}, {"label": "Reliability, support", "summary": "One customer calls it a reliable computer backed by responsive human email support.", "quotes": [{"id": 766018560, "item_id": 47876160, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876160", "by": "schpet", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone", "excerpt": "as an exe customer i'm really happy to see this. i don't even use half of their features (such as the https proxy, or the LLM agent) but it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone. i use hetzner too in the same way for a bit of redundancy but exe seems less likely to delete all my machines and data. every time i've had an issue or question, it's been the same sympathetic people helping ", "context": "exe customer", "use_case": "remote machine via ssh", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "No outbound firewall", "summary": "One commenter says it would be ideal but lacks an outbound firewall.", "quotes": [{"id": 787848723, "item_id": 49240545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49240545", "by": "rusch", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "compare", "quote": "https://exe.dev/ would be perfect but it does not come with outbound firewall.", "excerpt": "The login is annoying but, lacking an open source alternative, this has been my daily driver for a while now because it works great out of the box with two key features: outbound firewall and secret injection with placeholders. I run it with superset and then each git worktree is mounted in a sandbox that is configured for each repo i work in. Closest open source I have seen is https://earendil-works.github.io/gondol", "context": "", "use_case": "agent sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker Sandboxes \u2013 Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"}]}, {"label": "Not true sandboxes", "summary": "The VMs are plain computers/microVMs rather than sandboxes in the strict sense.", "quotes": [{"id": 784847552, "item_id": 49052972, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052972", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing.", "excerpt": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing. Also remember these aren't really sandboxes per se, they're just computers/microvms. Exe also has a neat auth/https proxy that also does TLS/certs they have lots of cool tools and integrations.", "context": "", "use_case": "persistent sandboxed Linux VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fly.io CEO Kurt Mackey is stepping down"}]}, {"label": "Hosted only", "summary": "A self-hoster built a similar setup on their own server instead of using exe.dev.", "quotes": [{"id": 762663313, "item_id": 47666457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47666457", "by": "dimitry12", "date": "2026-04-06", "stance": "compare", "quote": "exe.dev popularized this UX, but I self-host a lot of things already", "excerpt": "(I am not the author of vmtree) Would be pretty magical if when you need a sandbox, you just SSH into it and it's already there, right? exe.dev popularized this UX, but I self-host a lot of things already, so I wanted something similar, but on my own server, which has plenty of spare RAM and CPU cores. I tasked Gemini DeepResearch with finding what I can use to glue together something like exe.dev. In a typical Gemin", "context": "self-hosts many things", "use_case": "SSH sandboxes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosted disposable sandboxes with exe.dev-like UX"}]}], "who": [{"by": "skybrian", "context": "started using coding agents in December", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012959", "date": "2026-10-08"}, {"by": "chadash", "context": "works mostly on remote servers", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859951", "date": "2026-07-10"}, {"by": "nzoschke", "context": "has churned through many dev tools", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949570", "date": "2026-04-29"}, {"by": "schpet", "context": "exe customer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876160", "date": "2026-04-23"}, {"by": "Imustaskforhelp", "context": "student", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400792", "date": "2025-12-27"}, {"by": "twotwotwo", "context": "Go developer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398209", "date": "2025-12-26"}], "tags": ["for coding agents", "for small web apps", "for hobby projects", "for mobile workflows"], "use_cases": ["coding agent", "development vms", "linux vms", "go agent harness", "ai-assisted code changes from browser", "running agent in ephemeral vm"], "compared": [{"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "fly-io", "name": "Fly.io", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "conductor", "name": "Conductor", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 786511713, "item_id": 49156982, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156982", "by": "crawshaw", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we should build it into Shelley", "excerpt": "(Author here.) FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I\u2019m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to ", "context": "article author", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Devtools must be open source"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46397609", "title": "Exe.dev/", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413629", "title": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872324", "title": "I Am Building a Cloud", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49525378", "title": "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390739", "title": "Show HN: Proliferate- open-source, self-hostable Codex for any coding agent", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832720", "title": "All your agents are going async", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {"compare": 2, "neutral": 2, "recommend": 4}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 4}, "2026-08": {"compare": 1, "neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 800207344, "item_id": 50012959, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012959", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev looked like a nice way to try it out.", "excerpt": "I have 11 VM\u2019s running on exe.dev for $20/month. There\u2019s one I use every day for my links website [1] and the rest are mostly-idle development machines. One of them has the git worktree and preview website for a static website that\u2019s hosted on Netlify. [2] Checking out a git repo in a Linux VM and hosting prod elsewhere (automatically deployed via a push to GitHub) seems like a nice pattern. Since exe.dev doesn\u2019t cha", "context": "started using coding agents in December", "use_case": "development VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 799737456, "item_id": 49983591, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983591", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-10-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use a web browser to connect from my laptop, tablet, and phone to use Linux VMs on exe.dev.", "excerpt": "A custom Mac application seems limiting compared to a web app. I use a web browser to connect from my laptop, tablet, and phone to use Linux VMs on exe.dev. But it might be nice to have a nice way to run VMs on my Mac mini, too.", "context": "", "use_case": "Linux VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Berthd"}, {"id": 796917985, "item_id": 49807374, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807374", "by": "ChaseRensberger", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "another Go harness i keep up to date with is:", "excerpt": "happy to see more harnesses in the Go space, i've had a fun time building https://github.com/ChaseRensberger/wingman i think the language primitives map well to the natural desire to use these tools across networks and in concurrent workloads. another Go harness i keep up to date with is: https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley (exe.dev team)", "context": "", "use_case": "Go agent harness", "switched_from": "", "story": "Unreal Agent"}, {"id": 795694304, "item_id": 49730894, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730894", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-09-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change", "excerpt": "I'm retired and write code as a hobby, not presentations or docs, but it fits how I use exe.dev to make a code change. I will have a conversation with the AI, then say \"Please go ahead\" and close my laptop to do something else. Since I use web browsers exclusively for this, I can check on its progress from my phone, tablet, or laptop. (They have iOS and Android apps too, but I've never bothered to install them.)", "context": "retired, writes code as a hobby", "use_case": "AI-assisted code changes from browser", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"}, {"id": 792432017, "item_id": 49527001, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527001", "by": "chews", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run it on exe.dev, it's an ephemeral VM company", "excerpt": "I've not, but really should. I run it on exe.dev, it's an ephemeral VM company and they have an agent of their own called shelley (which I used locally as well), Having kicked the tires on DSH(deepseek harness), I ported Shelley's skills into DSH, they are pretty simple text files that were easy to bridge over, it is more verbose but the plugin nature of it was really easy to extend, for example, I built a plugin tha", "context": "", "use_case": "running agent in ephemeral VM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"}, {"id": 792432018, "item_id": 49527001, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527001", "by": "chews", "date": "2026-09-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "they have an agent of their own called shelley (which I used locally as well)", "excerpt": "I've not, but really should. I run it on exe.dev, it's an ephemeral VM company and they have an agent of their own called shelley (which I used locally as well), Having kicked the tires on DSH(deepseek harness), I ported Shelley's skills into DSH, they are pretty simple text files that were easy to bridge over, it is more verbose but the plugin nature of it was really easy to extend, for example, I built a plugin tha", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"}, {"id": 792079984, "item_id": 49504999, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49504999", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use my budget with Shelley on exe.dev.", "excerpt": "Similarly, I use my budget with Shelley on exe.dev. But it seems nice that as far as I can tell, for ChatGPT usage, coding agents compete on a level footing. I still might try ChatGPT Work sometime if there was some feature I couldn't get from Shelley.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Understanding ChatGPT Work"}, {"id": 791715760, "item_id": 49482235, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482235", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-08-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev has a zillion of them: https://exe.dev/docs/integrations", "excerpt": "Now that we use coding agents, you don't want to store secrets anywhere in the same VM, because that makes them vulnerable to exfiltration. The best way is to access external services via a proxy that holds the secrets. exe.dev has a zillion of them: https://exe.dev/docs/integrations", "context": "", "use_case": "proxy integrations holding secrets for agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Twelve-Factor App (2025)"}, {"id": 790266834, "item_id": 49391677, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391677", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "exe.dev + Shelley + terminal multiplexer (https://zmx.sh/ or tmux) + `codex` CLI", "excerpt": "How does this compare to https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code or https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo? Is there a good resource indexing all the coding agent tools / harnesses? Every awesome list I've found so far seems very incomplete, but I'm sure its impossible to keep up. My daily drivers are still: - exe.dev + Shelley + terminal multiplexer (https://zmx.sh/ or tmux) + `codex` CLI - Conductor.build I would love an op", "context": "", "use_case": "daily coding agent setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Proliferate- open-source, self-hostable Codex for any coding agent"}, {"id": 790266835, "item_id": 49391677, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391677", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-08-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "exe.dev + Shelley + terminal multiplexer", "excerpt": "How does this compare to https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code or https://github.com/getpaseo/paseo? Is there a good resource indexing all the coding agent tools / harnesses? Every awesome list I've found so far seems very incomplete, but I'm sure its impossible to keep up. My daily drivers are still: - exe.dev + Shelley + terminal multiplexer (https://zmx.sh/ or tmux) + `codex` CLI - Conductor.build I would love an op", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Proliferate- open-source, self-hostable Codex for any coding agent"}, {"id": 787848723, "item_id": 49240545, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49240545", "by": "rusch", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "compare", "quote": "https://exe.dev/ would be perfect but it does not come with outbound firewall.", "excerpt": "The login is annoying but, lacking an open source alternative, this has been my daily driver for a while now because it works great out of the box with two key features: outbound firewall and secret injection with placeholders. I run it with superset and then each git worktree is mounted in a sandbox that is configured for each repo i work in. Closest open source I have seen is https://earendil-works.github.io/gondol", "context": "", "use_case": "agent sandboxing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker Sandboxes \u2013 Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"}, {"id": 785964912, "item_id": 49122807, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122807", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-07-31", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The coding agent I use (Shelley on exe.dev) has a pulldown menu where you choose the LLM when starting a new conversation. There is no lock-in.", "excerpt": "The coding agent I use (Shelley on exe.dev) has a pulldown menu where you choose the LLM when starting a new conversation. There is no lock-in. Conversations are not precious. Although, I do use ChatGPT more nowadays because their subscriptions work with Shelley. Sometimes I try other models after I hit the weekly cap on the subscription.", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Session You Cannot take with you"}, {"id": 784847552, "item_id": 49052972, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052972", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-07-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing.", "excerpt": "Check out exe.dev for basically what you are describing. Also remember these aren't really sandboxes per se, they're just computers/microvms. Exe also has a neat auth/https proxy that also does TLS/certs they have lots of cool tools and integrations.", "context": "", "use_case": "persistent sandboxed Linux VMs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Fly.io CEO Kurt Mackey is stepping down"}, {"id": 783973840, "item_id": 48998365, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998365", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-07-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've moved all my web stuff over to exe.dev", "excerpt": "I love Hetzner for some of the cheapest cloud components that can do anything. One use case is a custom ACME cert broker and DNS server. Another is their storage boxes split up into sub accounts for my and friends backups and music. I've moved all my web stuff over to exe.dev, but I also turn my Hetzer box into a similar \"Agent Computer\" by dropping in a binary with `claude` setup and a chat server: https://github.co", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting web projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Cheap Self-Hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud"}, {"id": 782307312, "item_id": 48894207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894207", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-07-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second", "excerpt": "We all know the dangers of running agents with no permissions on our laptop. The good news is its now just as easy to spin up a sandbox in the cloud for an experiment or coding session than it is on your laptop. Possibly easier since laptop sandboxes aren't as cut and dry as a new cloud VM. exe.dev is my sandbox infra of choice. You get a new sandbox in literally a second with SSH and a coding agent (Shelley) built i", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud sandboxes for coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers"}, {"id": 781759217, "item_id": 48859951, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859951", "by": "chadash", "date": "2026-07-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "i love exe.dev", "excerpt": "i use vim quite a bit! I find that in this new era, i'm in the command line a lot and like to stay in the command line. vim (I use neovim) is a good way to do that. Furthermore, a lot of my workflow is now done on remote servers (i love exe.dev) where claude code is sandboxed to an extent (it can still cause damage, just not to my main computer's file system). When I'm configuring those, i have a setup script that in", "context": "works mostly on remote servers", "use_case": "remote servers for sandboxed Claude Code", "switched_from": "", "story": "How do you use Vim in the era of AI?"}, {"id": 780466816, "item_id": 48779176, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48779176", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-07-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you could just use a great agent/harness like Shelley that already uses sqlite to store converians is searchable from the UI as well.", "excerpt": "Or you could just use a great agent/harness like Shelley that already uses sqlite to store converians is searchable from the UI as well. https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent with searchable history", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: ctx \u2013 Search the coding agent history already on your machine"}, {"id": 775878304, "item_id": 48492394, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492394", "by": "eigencoder", "date": "2026-06-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have been using `exe.dev` lately", "excerpt": "Yeah, I think this will really be a thing. I have been using `exe.dev` lately, and I was at an AirBnB with my family where we wanted to play a game, but it needed pencil and paper for each person, but we didn't have those. I thought it would be nice to have a little web app where you could write your input and then vote on other people's responses directly from your phone. I just spun up a VM on exe.dev, asked the AI", "context": "", "use_case": "spinning up VMs for AI-built apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"}, {"id": 774663248, "item_id": 48416453, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416453", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I'd say try it out you won't be disappointed.", "excerpt": "Up to 50 VMs with your shared resource pool for $20/mo, just all their unique features like http integrations and Shelley of course is just native, their exeuntu image has everything you need. Build with Shelley, no need to deploy it's already on the VM (tell Shelley to setup systemd to \"productionize\" it) with a my-vm.exe.xyz url with auto-https via exe's https proxy where you can keep it private to your exe login o", "context": "", "use_case": "VM hosting for agent-built apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 774663249, "item_id": 48416453, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416453", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Build with Shelley, no need to deploy it's already on the VM", "excerpt": "Up to 50 VMs with your shared resource pool for $20/mo, just all their unique features like http integrations and Shelley of course is just native, their exeuntu image has everything you need. Build with Shelley, no need to deploy it's already on the VM (tell Shelley to setup systemd to \"productionize\" it) with a my-vm.exe.xyz url with auto-https via exe's https proxy where you can keep it private to your exe login o", "context": "", "use_case": "building apps on the VM", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 774627232, "item_id": 48414202, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414202", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great", "excerpt": "I'm a bit of a fanboy, but exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great", "context": "", "use_case": "AI dev environment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 774627233, "item_id": 48414202, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414202", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-06-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great", "excerpt": "I'm a bit of a fanboy, but exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great", "context": "", "use_case": "web coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"}, {"id": 767193121, "item_id": 47949570, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949570", "by": "nzoschke", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "exe.dev is the first \"dev container\" I've ever *loved*.", "excerpt": "Congrats! My daily driver is Zed developing on SSH remote servers on exe.dev. It's crazy to think of all the dev tools I've churned through over the last 18 months but these two feel sticky. Zed has everything I need in a unified pane. File editor, terminal, agents, SSH remotes. And it's fast and intuitive exe.dev is the first \"dev container\" I've ever *loved*. The remote sandbox means `dangerously-skip-permissions` ", "context": "has churned through many dev tools", "use_case": "remote dev sandbox", "switched_from": "", "story": "Zed is 1.0"}, {"id": 766054529, "item_id": 47878408, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47878408", "by": "indigodaddy", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use both fly and exe.", "excerpt": "I use both fly and exe. Exe isn't really \"docker image as the app\"-focused like fly, but if you want to sort of mimic the fly deploy process you kinda sorta could make it work for you I would think. This might help: https://exe.dev/docs/customization", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 766035665, "item_id": 47877229, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877229", "by": "pclark", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Exe.dev seems like a good middleground where I can allocate the compute from tiny to large.", "excerpt": "I think I am interested in this? I run a bunch of small web apps, currently as fly.io machines. I love fly, but it adds up when I have a bunch of small things that I want isolated \u2014 I wish I could have even smaller Fly instances. Exe.dev seems like a good middleground where I can allocate the compute from tiny to large. (?)", "context": "", "use_case": "hosting small web apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 766033872, "item_id": 47877117, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877117", "by": "dbmikus", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute", "excerpt": "I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute and then can split it up into as many VMs as I want. I use exe.dev to run little vibe-coded apps and it's nice to just leave them running without a spend meter ticking up. We're thinking about switching to this pricing model for our own startup[1] (we run sandboxed coding agents for dev teams). We run on Daytona right now for sandboxes.", "context": "", "use_case": "running vibe-coded apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 766018560, "item_id": 47876160, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876160", "by": "schpet", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone", "excerpt": "as an exe customer i'm really happy to see this. i don't even use half of their features (such as the https proxy, or the LLM agent) but it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone. i use hetzner too in the same way for a bit of redundancy but exe seems less likely to delete all my machines and data. every time i've had an issue or question, it's been the same sympathetic people helping ", "context": "exe customer", "use_case": "remote machine via ssh", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 765865872, "item_id": 47866617, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866617", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-04-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019m a happy user of exe.dev VM\u2019s.", "excerpt": "This already exists. I\u2019m a happy user of exe.dev VM\u2019s. They have a coding agent called Shelley (https://exe.dev/shelley) that works fine in a web browser on my laptop, tablet, and phone. I can close my laptop at at any time and the agent keeps running in the VM. It works with multiple LLM\u2019s. The main downside is that since they go through the API, it gets expensive once the monthly quota runs out. (They claim to rese", "context": "", "use_case": "persistent VMs for coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "All your agents are going async"}, {"id": 765865873, "item_id": 47866617, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47866617", "by": "skybrian", "date": "2026-04-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "They have a coding agent called Shelley (https://exe.dev/shelley) that works fine in a web browser on my laptop, tablet, and phone.", "excerpt": "This already exists. I\u2019m a happy user of exe.dev VM\u2019s. They have a coding agent called Shelley (https://exe.dev/shelley) that works fine in a web browser on my laptop, tablet, and phone. I can close my laptop at at any time and the agent keeps running in the VM. It works with multiple LLM\u2019s. The main downside is that since they go through the API, it gets expensive once the monthly quota runs out. (They claim to rese", "context": "", "use_case": "web-based coding agent", "switched_from": "", "story": "All your agents are going async"}, {"id": 764013298, "item_id": 47750831, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47750831", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-04-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I am just using a 7$/yr vps or exe.dev (I had signed up on it since day one)", "excerpt": "I feel like its a good approach, personally I am just using a 7$/yr vps or exe.dev (I had signed up on it since day one) If someone wishes to do something like this, I recommend quickget for linux and orbstack for macos although quickget can work on mac. I really like this project too https://github.com/losfair/bake", "context": "", "use_case": "isolated dev environment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone reconsidered Antivirus software after recent security news?"}, {"id": 762663313, "item_id": 47666457, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47666457", "by": "dimitry12", "date": "2026-04-06", "stance": "compare", "quote": "exe.dev popularized this UX, but I self-host a lot of things already", "excerpt": "(I am not the author of vmtree) Would be pretty magical if when you need a sandbox, you just SSH into it and it's already there, right? exe.dev popularized this UX, but I self-host a lot of things already, so I wanted something similar, but on my own server, which has plenty of spare RAM and CPU cores. I tasked Gemini DeepResearch with finding what I can use to glue together something like exe.dev. In a typical Gemin", "context": "self-hosts many things", "use_case": "SSH sandboxes", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-hosted disposable sandboxes with exe.dev-like UX"}, {"id": 759998992, "item_id": 47499937, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499937", "by": "Imustaskforhelp", "date": "2026-03-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "they are pretty cool and I use them quite often", "excerpt": "Great to see this but exe.dev (not sponsored but they are pretty cool and I use them quite often, if they wish to sponsor me that would be awesome haha :-]) actually has this functionality natively built in. but its great to see some other open source alternatives within this space as well.", "context": "", "use_case": "agent UI verification", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: ProofShot \u2013 Give AI coding agents eyes to verify the UI they build"}, {"id": 751781088, "item_id": 46986318, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986318", "by": "acoyfellow", "date": "2026-02-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I do a fun orchestration system for long running loops on exe.dev", "excerpt": "I do a fun orchestration system for long running loops on exe.dev (small write up docs.coey.dev) and I feel like I have super powers. Self healing, I try two ways: 1) use a memory tool to store learnings for next iteration (Deja.coey.dev) and have the loop system instructions tell how to use it. One orchestrator, and sequential worker agents who run til their context is full and then hand off to the next run with lea", "context": "", "use_case": "running long agent loops", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone achieved recursive self-improvement with agentic tools?"}, {"id": 751781090, "item_id": 46986318, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986318", "by": "acoyfellow", "date": "2026-02-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the agent Shelley on exe can search past convos when promoted too for continuation.", "excerpt": "I do a fun orchestration system for long running loops on exe.dev (small write up docs.coey.dev) and I feel like I have super powers. Self healing, I try two ways: 1) use a memory tool to store learnings for next iteration (Deja.coey.dev) and have the loop system instructions tell how to use it. One orchestrator, and sequential worker agents who run til their context is full and then hand off to the next run with lea", "context": "", "use_case": "searching past conversations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Has anyone achieved recursive self-improvement with agentic tools?"}, {"id": 744615344, "item_id": 46538459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538459", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating", "excerpt": "Used Shelley to write a little guestbook late at night in bed from my phone! Was a fun experience. Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating, assessing the state of the things & groking what I was talking about. All zero friction. I had signed up for an https://exe.dev account to play around, check out their neat VM offering. I didn't know Shell", "context": "", "use_case": "building a guestbook from phone", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shelley: A Coding Agent for Exe.dev"}, {"id": 744615345, "item_id": 46538459, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538459", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "check out their neat VM offering", "excerpt": "Used Shelley to write a little guestbook late at night in bed from my phone! Was a fun experience. Shelley wrote all the code. It was also quite good at launching a browser, seeing the site, scrolling & navigating, assessing the state of the things & groking what I was talking about. All zero friction. I had signed up for an https://exe.dev account to play around, check out their neat VM offering. I didn't know Shell", "context": "", "use_case": "VM hosting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shelley: A Coding Agent for Exe.dev"}, {"id": 744148928, "item_id": 46509308, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46509308", "by": "jeffrallen", "date": "2026-01-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as Steve (with a better UI).", "excerpt": "You're old fashioned, and that's ok, if it's ok with you. But when high level languages were getting started, we had to read and debug the the transformed lower level output they made (hello C-front). At a certain point, most of us stopped debugging the layer below and most LLVM IR and assembly flow by without anyone reading it. I use https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as", "context": "", "use_case": "orchestrating coding agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Welcome to Gas Town"}, {"id": 743882896, "item_id": 46492681, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492681", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going", "excerpt": "Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going, has a front end http gateway that does all the hard parts for you. But relevant to this article here, it also has a super sick web based agent, Shelley, that is quite adequate for using from the phone. I used it to build a little guestbook thing in ~2 hours, late night in bed in my phone. Li", "context": "", "use_case": "VM hosting with https", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Code On-the-Go"}, {"id": 743882897, "item_id": 46492681, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492681", "by": "jauntywundrkind", "date": "2026-01-04", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it also has a super sick web based agent, Shelley, that is quite adequate for using from the phone.", "excerpt": "Shout out to https://exe.dev for this stuff. It'a a VM provider service. It makes it stunningly easy to get https up and going, has a front end http gateway that does all the hard parts for you. But relevant to this article here, it also has a super sick web based agent, Shelley, that is quite adequate for using from the phone. I used it to build a little guestbook thing in ~2 hours, late night in bed in my phone. Li", "context": "", "use_case": "coding agent from phone", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Code On-the-Go"}, {"id": 742476208, "item_id": 46404763, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404763", "by": "loulouxiv", "date": "2025-12-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used their Shelley coding agent to vibe-code a multiplayer Queen of spade game", "excerpt": "As a test I used their Shelley coding agent to vibe-code a multiplayer Queen of spade game : https://extra-crimson.exe.xyz/", "context": "", "use_case": "vibe-coding a game", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exe.dev/"}, {"id": 742371344, "item_id": 46398209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398209", "by": "twotwotwo", "date": "2025-12-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd use it.", "excerpt": "So I tried this the other day after fellow Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it recently. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and can spin up cloud stuff--it's not like I didn't have computing resources already. I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) ", "context": "Go developer", "use_case": "quick disposable public VMs for projects", "switched_from": "", "story": "Exe.dev/"}]}