Turn And Face The Strange · The Fly Blog
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Author
Name
Kurt Mackey
@mrkurt
@mrkurt
Image by
Annie Ruygt
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 post. So I need you to promise me something: if you read past this introduction, you’ll read the whole rest of the way through. It’s an honor thing.
A couple months back, Theo Browne ran a video rating the “best place to host a new application in 2026”. Theo tends to say nice things about us. He did this time too. But then he concluded by saying that of all the providers he pays attention to, we were the one he was least confident would be around by the end of the year.
Well, fuck.
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 . But that take has been rattling around in my brain. It whacked me right on a raw nerve, about what we’re doing and where we’re going as a company.
Honestly, I should’ve seen this coming. Fly.io has been motoring along this year, but I’ve coasted a bit, letting the company smolder in an unresolved identity crisis.
I’m going to overshare some more in a second, but I won’t leave you hanging. So: we’ve raised a bunch more money. We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.
Product-Market Fit
I started Fly.io with two clear principles that probably don’t matter anymore.
The first is that Internet applications work best when they’re fast, and that happens when they’re deployed close to users. I learned this over many years of working at Ars Technica, and started Fly.io in part to scratch an itch. It was our mantra over the first several years of the company.
The second is that cloud infrastructure is too complicated. Developers need platforms with the flexibility of AWS and the ergonomics of Heroku. When we started Fly.io, you couldn’t get both things at the same time, and now you can, here and elsewhere.
You read this and say, “no shit, of course these things are important.” But I’m here to tell you they’re less important than you think, for an obvious reason — the only reason anybody talks about anymore. AI has transmogrified software development. The dingo has truly eaten our baby.
† For the past 18 months, every time I’ve said these words, they’ve gotten even truer.
I don’t think it’s fully sunk in yet[†]. We’re still trying to integrate coding agents into our profession like they’re sufficiently smart compilers. But AI isn’t like the difference between shipping C code and shipping Ruby. It’s much bigger.
Everybody forgets that before Dan Bricklin invented the spreadsheet, every “Excel document” in the world was a computer program, built by a computer programmer. In just a matter of years, every business professional became a programmer, using the world’s most important programming language, spreadsheet formulas. AI is like that, but bigger. Almost anybody will probably be able to build almost any kind of computer program.
Now consider conventional public cloud infrastructure. We take fixed-function applications built to rigorous standards on fussy CI/CD rails and ship them to audiences of millions of people. But a computer program with an audience of millions will soon be like a spreadsheet with an audience of a million readers. They exist! But they’re not the norm.
Betting on an opinionated public cloud design from 2020 is the same as betting against personalized, adaptive software. I don’t think that’s a good bet. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want to make it. I want a world where my friends and family can make computers do exactly what they want, without waiting for me to build everything for them.
What Agents Want
That brings us to our second founding principle, which is that serious cloud infrastructure is too hard for developers to use well. And: still true! But this even more obviously doesn’t matter anymore.
† It is in fact possible that it’s now worse to have a carefully curated human developer experience with opinionated defaults. Agents work best when things are explicit.
To a first approximation, nobody reads documentation...