exe.dev wins over developers: SSH into root VMs, plus the underrated Shelley coding agent
davidcrawshaw · x · 2026-09-22
A quote-tweet apology from jonallie sparked renewed attention for exe.dev:
- Model: buy a pool of CPU/RAM/disk, spin up as many VMs as you like, ssh exe.dev gets you root with apt and systemd; servers are persistent, private by default, and shareable via IAM
- Shelley: the built-in web coding agent, which users say is criminally underrated among AI dev agents
- Real use case: Filippo Valsorda vibecoded a FIPS 140 validation backoffice with exe.dev + Opus 4.5 — lab view, public client links, guided test scripts — without ever reading the code
- Users report coding from their phone, managing remote servers, and dropping Copilot entirely
- The poster's takeaway: beyond flashy agent swarms, the most valuable use of agents is simply doing your existing work faster
More from coding & agent
- Exa MCP hits 5,000 GitHub stars as AI agents flock to its search integration — TheIshanGoswami · 2026-09-22
- Anthropic's Swiss cheese model explains why passing evals isn't enough for agents — hugobowne · 2026-09-22
- OpenAI's artists are now all using Codex in their workflow — andrew_n_carr · 2026-09-22
- TinyTorch: PyTorch's free curriculum to build an ML framework from scratch in 20 modules — PyTorch · 2026-09-22
- Adaptive reasoning for Codex tweaks effort mid-CoT based on task difficulty — daniel_mac8 · 2026-09-22
- End-to-end video editing and publishing pipeline built with Codex — brandon_galang · 2026-09-22