> Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software. Economists would call this an instance of Jevons paradox. Each of us will write more programs, for fun and for work.
There is already so much software out there, which isn't used by anyone. Just take a look at any appstore. I don't understand why we are so obsessed with cranking out even more, whereas the obvious usecase for LLMs should be to write better software. Let's hope the focus shifts from code generation to something else. There are many ways LLMs can assist in writing better code.
Sometimes “better” means “customized for my specific use case.” I expect that there will be a lot of custom software that never appears in any app store.
My intuition is that agents lift up the floor to some degree, but at the same time will lead to more software being produced that’s of mediocre quality, with outliers of higher quality emerging at a higher rate than before.
Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale.
> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.
I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.
Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.
Yes, but you can’t directly compare SAN-style storage with a local NVMe. But I agree that it’s too expensive, but not nearly as insane as the bandwidth pricing. If you go to a vendor and ask for a petabyte of storage, and it needs to be fully redundant, and you need the ability to take PIT-consistent multi-volume snapshots, be ready to pay up. And this is what’s being offered here.
And yes, IO typically happens in 4kb blocks, so you need a decent amount of IOPS to get the full bandwidth.
Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed.
I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.
> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.
The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.
Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.
Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.
i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.
i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.
Because if I have a government service with millions of users, I don’t want the cheap shitter servers to crap out on me.
An employee is going to cost anywhere between 8k and 50k per month. Hiring an employee to save 200/month on servers by using a shitty VPS provider is not saving you any money.
Agree, I used to always use Heroku or Render style platforms for my own software, but nowadays I just have a Linux server with Docker Compose and a Cron job. The cron job every minute runs docker pull (downloads latest image) and docker up -d (switches to new version only if there is a new version). And put caddy in front for the HTTPS. This has been very cheap and reliable for years now.
Especially these days you can SSH to a baremetal server and just tell Claude to set up Postgres. Job done. You don't need autoscaling because you can afford a server that's 5X faster from the start.
Honestly I like Hetzner a lot but lately it has been very unstable for us. https://status.hetzner.com/ this page always has couple of incidents happening at the same time. I really appreciate the services they provide but i wish they were more stable.
One thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now quite cumbersome to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling isn't a good fit for it?
Also I'm curious why not railway like billing per resource utilization pricing model? It’s very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era.
I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.
Much respect for the ambitous plan, I wish I could do such bold thinking. I am running a small PHP PaaS (fortrabbit) for more than 10 years. For me, it's not only "scratch your own itch", but also "know your audience". So, a limited feature set with a high level of abstraction can also be useful for some users > clear path.
Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
Sobering comment for all the little people like myself who dream of owning a business based on a vision of cool tech that just does what it promises (as opposed to all the corporate shovelware out there)
The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.
The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.
As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.
Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes:
I don't think SSH vs OpenTofu is the core issue here.
For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
There is already so much software out there, which isn't used by anyone. Just take a look at any appstore. I don't understand why we are so obsessed with cranking out even more, whereas the obvious usecase for LLMs should be to write better software. Let's hope the focus shifts from code generation to something else. There are many ways LLMs can assist in writing better code.
As for the average quality: it’s unclear.
My intuition is that agents lift up the floor to some degree, but at the same time will lead to more software being produced that’s of mediocre quality, with outliers of higher quality emerging at a higher rate than before.
> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.
I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.
Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.
But I'm fairly certain OP knows this.
Edit: I posted this before reading, and these two are the same he points out.
And yes, IO typically happens in 4kb blocks, so you need a decent amount of IOPS to get the full bandwidth.
I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.
> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.
The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.
Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.
No thank you.
Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.
i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.
i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
An employee is going to cost anywhere between 8k and 50k per month. Hiring an employee to save 200/month on servers by using a shitty VPS provider is not saving you any money.
OP is not saying they push new versions at such a high frequency they need checks every one minute.
The choice of one minute vs 15 minute is implementation detail and when architected like this costs nothing.
I hope that helps. Again this is my own take.
It is like 4 lines of config for Postgres, the only line you need to change is on which path Postgres should store the data.
One thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now quite cumbersome to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling isn't a good fit for it?
Also I'm curious why not railway like billing per resource utilization pricing model? It’s very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era.
I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.
Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.
Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
The technology itself in its current form is not valuable
The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
"That must be worst website ever made"
Made me love the site and style even more
52.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)
Hey wait a minute!
https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/mast...
It also has a CLI, hcloud. Am I getting any value with exe.dev I couldn't get with an 80 line hcloud wrapper?
For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
- I'm building a server farm in my homelab.
- I'm doing a small startup to see if this idea works.
- We're taking on AWS by being more cost effective. Funding secured.
> $20 a month
2025 or 2005, what's the difference?