I haven't paid super close attention to Orbs, but I also build an agent runtime + orchestration layer on top of remote VMs (https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika). I do think it's smart marketing to name the concept. And for coding agents, there's a lot of annoying fiddly stuff you have to do to get the experience to work well:

    1. auto-refresh base VM snapshots with latest delta of git commit changes
    2. extend the VM lifetime when it receives an interaction (chat, HTTP request, etc.) and sleep it when inactive
    3. oauth refresh of MCP servers, coding agent subscriptions, etc.
    4. support inter-VM and communication for agents and exec commands
    5. keeping track of agent work across VMs

A few examples:

Many remote agents products have a "one agent per VM" restriction, but it's better to have N agents across M VMs. For example, I have agents work on a singular VM in parallel worktrees and then stack the worktrees at the end on that VM for the final change.

Just give me OpenSSH with normal SSH key management. Lets you manage VM access the same way we've done it since the 90s.

Connect VMs in a network topology: we build our VM/agent scheduling + remote control product inside itself, so we often test interactions between user, control plane, and sandbox(es). If you can directly control VM creation and lifecycle, it's easy to spin this structure up and let agents work across it.

I should be able to use whichever coding agents I want, connected to the VM. Whether that's OpenCode or Pi Web in the browser, or loading the VM into Cursor or Codex app, or using the TUI or sending messages to agent(s) via API.

Hey! Author of the post here. Sounds like I failed my mission with the post then :)

Yes, like many things, Orbs are "wrappers" around VMs, but the point is that some wrappers enable new ways to hold and use and reuse the thing they wrap, and even give you a different perspective on it.

That's what happened with our team once we had Orbs working. We knew beforehand all the things they're made of (fast to start sandboxes, scale to zero, live streaming updates on all clients, one machine per conversation, etc) but what really surprised us was how it changed our workflow by removing friction we didn't even know was there. The friction of creating new checkouts and worktrees and managing local resources -- it sounds trite, of course, but man, once you can stop thinking about it, it's so much better.

So, yes, maybe they're wrappers but hey, some people say the tortilla is what makes it a burrito, you know?

This is Apple's entire business model.

Also most proprietary software, also most web-based software, also most APIs... also what my plumber does when I call him over!

(Also most hardware?)

I kept reading (I mean scanning) to see if it uses orb stack[1] locally.

[1] https://orbstack.dev/

yes, just like Dropbox is just FTP and rsync

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> I have a few qualms with this app:

> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software

Obviously I'm not claiming that this will be anywhere near as successful as the iPod or Dropbox. It might not succeed at all. But I would have thought we'd be past this sort of dismissal by now.

Also, they can literally train the LLM inside the VM they create so it becomes an expert in whatever tools are there. And since they control the entire sandbox, less permission issues are likely.

I think they will become extremely vertical integrated sooner or later because that will be the most efficient and effective way to do this. I'm guessing anyone building this kind of thing now has only one hope: acquisition.

Anthropic has Claude Code Web -- sorry, looks like the official name is "Claude Code on the web" -- which I think is basically this? I've been using it for a while and I really like it.

Nothing to do with latency, I think, it's all about convenience and safety. I don't have to worry about running an agent on the computer that knows all my admin API tokens and SSH keys, and the agent isn't interrupted if I close my laptop.

The one thing that might be useful is the ability to run on a beefier machine when you need it, e.g. make sure it has direct access to a GPU. But then you're back to thinking about the host VM, not fully abstracting away from it.

OpenAI already does this with Codex cloud

https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud

From my experience, Orbs have been more consistent, along with Cursor's agents

A bunch of people are in this space. I have my own personal cloud stack.

In Spyro 2 you collect orbs to activate the portal to defeat the evil wizard guy.

There’s nothing threatening about Little Fluffy Clouds.

Yep, and also at the same pricing, so then why not go for established providers?

Wtf is Orbs?

I enjoyed the demo vids and seeing the way these VMs are implemented.

>requires a phone number…at the END of the registration

I do not appreciate that at all. Phone number, understandable, but it better be all the way up front.

Im pretty sure Orbs were released before Grok Bot.

Also Grok Bot is incidentally just a wrapper for cursor cloud sessions/vm's

A pokeball!