[MrOrelliOReilly]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[macNchz]

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.

[MrOrelliOReilly]

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!

[dtkav]

The main things i think are missing is (1) how much am i spending and (2) why isn't my sprite paused, and (3) how can i get my stuff out (it would be nice to be able to mount in either direction or else integrate with git/git worktrees).

I ended up using it (and enjoying yolo mode!) but then my sprites weren't pausing and i was worried about spending too much so i deleted them.

[mcpherrinm]

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

[el_nahual]

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!

[tptacek]

Naming? We got naming wrong?