Fly.io CEO Kurt Mackey Steps Down to Focus on AI Agents and Sprites

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.

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 […]

> 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.

Hard for me to see this as anything other than fly.io committing suicide. AI sandboxes are a crowded product space, basically a complete commodity at this point, and the new CEO will likely focus on profit to the detriment of creative vision.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

Most people are going under identity crisis right now because of recent LLM advancements. This post is a good example that shows that it's not only happening at the individual level, but also on the company/organization level.

Is it still worth building products or companies that can be one-shotted by AI? Probably not.

One interesting consequence is that this force everyone to be more ambitious and do something bigger that's impossible before.

I hope more people are working on something that can always bring net positive to humanity even if there are hundreds of people working on the same thing, like clean energy.

Sprites seems like a solid lifestyle business for a few friends, not a startup that has taken funding.

As a developer, I use docker/podman. Works great.

The new massive market that will open up, where grandma and grandpa are making apps, will be taken up by Lovable (and the like). Non-devs will not be using sprites.

You’re capturing some small percentage of existing developers.

> The dingo has truly eaten our baby.

It is so strange that people still say this. A family lost their child.

> Five of the most dangerous words in startups are “¿Por qué no los dos?”.

So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?