Dev ditches DigitalOcean for exe.dev: SSH-in-as-root sandboxes with a built-in coding agent
ibuildthecloud · x · 2026-10-17
Developer ibuildthecloud says exe.dev has replaced DigitalOcean for him, praising its pricing/resource model — while joking he's not sure it's healthy for exe.dev itself.
exe.dev markets itself as "computers for developers and agents":
- Pool model: reserve a pool of vCPUs and memory shared by your VMs, ideal for "software factory" workloads
- SSH in as root with apt and systemd; servers are persistent, private by default, shareable via IAM
- Built-in web coding agent Shelley; optional Google Calendar/Gmail integration stores only a refresh token and issues one-hour access tokens to VMs
- Warm community reception: Filippo Valsorda says he vibecoded a FIPS 140 validation backoffice with exe.dev + Opus 4.5 without reading a line of code; some HN users still find the site confusing
Related event: exe.dev offers persistent sandbox VMs as a DigitalOcean alternative(2 posts)→
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