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Sprites
3 posts about Sprites. Every summary links to the original.
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- 1 company
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Turn And Face The Strange
Fly.io announces a strategic shift toward Sprites, its “computers for agents,” after concluding that AI-driven software development changes the needs its public-cloud platform should serve. The company says coding agents increasingly run in cloud-hosted workstations because laptops stop when closed, while conventional cloud resources impose too much commitment for semi-disposable agent workloads. Sprites are designed to be created rapidly in large numbers, retain 100GB durable disks, use metered utility billing that pauses during inactivity, and host Internet-accessible applications. The post says a new iteration adds scaling and orchestration work plus the Sprite Block Device, while Fly Machines and platform-as-a-service features will continue. Fly.io also announces new funding and Scott Johnston as CEO, with the founder moving to an advisor role.
Building Agents that Don't Break Themselves
Agents that call shell commands can damage their host, so the post separates the agent’s durable home from the environment where untrusted code executes. It presents Sprites as disposable, isolated sandboxes, with one Sprite per session for the multi-user SpriteDoc and one persistent Sprite per task for Hermes Agent. SpriteDoc injects each user’s flyctl credential only for the command that needs it, avoiding token storage while preserving the user’s permissions; Hermes can omit approval prompts because the sandbox protects the host. The same separation applies when Hermes itself runs inside a Sprite: its commands are dispatched to another Sprite with a different identity and boot. Copy-on-write checkpoints provide an undo path, restoring deleted files and tools in about nine seconds.
The Design & Implementation of Sprites
Sprites are Linux virtual machines designed as fast, disposable computers with root access, persistent 100GB durable filesystems, automatic sleeping, and low inactive cost. To make creation feel instantaneous, the platform removes user-facing OCI container images and keeps pools of preloaded standard Fly Machines, so a new Sprite mainly performs startup work rather than pulling and unpacking an image. Its storage stack follows a hacked-up JuiceFS model, splitting immutable data chunks from metadata, keeping metadata durable with Litestream, and using a sparse NVMe volume as a dm-cache-like read-through cache for object storage; checkpoints and restores primarily shuffle metadata. This design supports migration and recovery without depending on local storage, while low-cost sleeping and object-backed disks suit interactive work more than warm, containerized production workloads, and billing applies only to storage blocks actually written.
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