I appreciate the Fly.io team’s enthusiasm and am optimistic this will mature into a product I’d pay for, but my initial impression was of a lack of polish.

Documentation is sparse, or not even available? The API docs don’t tell you much about the service itself, and a Google search for docs returns an inaccessible website as the first result (https://docs.sprites.dev). Blog posts and forum threads and Claude skills shouldn’t be a substitute.

The snappiness of the sprites is very cool and I can definitely see it integrating into future Claude Code workflows. But the lack of a base container images means you’re still doing setup work on the sprite before you can begin development. I understand the philosophy is that sandboxes should be persistent, but Claude Code sessions also work better when isolated from each other, so it’d be nice to have some precepts to get a workspace setup quickly (given agentic coding is clearly a target).

I also found the CLI unintuitive but maybe that was just me!

So very cool idea but left with the impression that the Fly.io team’s should have spent a couple weeks on polish before shipping.

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tptacek 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're not wrong. The documentation actually had a hallucinated link to an Anthropic dependency in it when we shipped. Right now the attitude is mostly "if we have to document it extensively, we're doing something wrong". It's been in the works for awhile, with a small team, and we're just getting it out there right now.

I've been needling Kurt for several months now that if we wait until it's polished enough that we don't see comments like this, we're doing it wrong.

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macNchz 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

For what it's worth, I evaluated Fly.io during a divorce from Heroku some time in mid 2022 (I think), found the platform was... way too rough around the edges at the time to want to migrate any real workloads. I kept it on my radar and shipped an MVP with it in 2024, found it was a lot more polished, and now have multiple production apps running there. I'm genuinely pumped about Sprites and have started building against the API—I did notice the weirdness with the docs, but you guys have been doing well on the "this thing that {was broken|I didn't like|was missing} now works the way I'd hoped it would" front.

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MrOrelliOReilly 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Appreciate your perspective and totally understand that at some point you just have to ship it! From the outside it looks like a bit less time on XYZ feature and bit more time on marketing polish might have been a good call. But can only speculate what the trade offs were internally. Best of luck maturing the product!

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mcpherrinm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm sure this is a difference-of-learning or whatever, but I'm usually unwilling to try a product until I can understand it and how it works from the documentation

	▲	tptacek 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Understandable. Our current take is that there's not really much to know, and that the people this will really light up are good with that. Of course, we'll flesh out documentation! I'm really jazzed about this particular product as a product (I just really enjoy using it), but the post is mostly about how we built it, and deliberately not much about how best to use it.

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el_nahual 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I hate being negative but it sounds like par for the course for fly.

Incredible (truly, incredible, world-class) engineers that somehow lack that final 10% of polish/naming/documentation that makes things...well, seriously usable.

I remember last time I tried them the bizarre hoops/documentation around database creation. I _think_ they solved that but I remember at the time it felt almost like I was getting looked down upon as a user. Ugh, you need clarity? how amateurish!

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tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Naming? We got naming wrong?

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el_nahual 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Could not have illustrated the point better if I tried.

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dcre 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Likewise!

	▲	killthebuddha 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		+1. This thread, the thread about documentation, and the thread about turning off Sprites, when taken together, thoroughly illustrate why I'm not currently a Fly user.