Industry-wide, we often develop our software in three distinct environments. Perhaps your laptop is a Mac; your CI system is hosted GitHub Actions, and your prod is k8s.
Three-in-One
For some use cases, you need not bother with the complexity; use one exe.dev vm for all three. A blog, a dashboard, a link shortener, a bot, and so on: these work well with the environments collapsed. Add features by asking Shelley to do so. Set up continuous deployment by asking Shelley to poll every hour. Use git for a backup if it calls for it. Voila!
Just Dev
Use an exe.dev vm (or many) to work on your software. Set up the GitHub integration (docs) to make cloning easy. Some people work serially. Some people work using multiple worktrees on one vm. Some people have one vm per task or project. Clone your VMs using ‘cp’ or configure them using setup scripts.
Using remote VMs opens up the convenience of mobile, opportunities for sharing, not to mention isolation from your other projects.
Why now? Many, many companies have tried remote development before. There is an entire graveyard of failed startups in this space. The big difference is agents. If your development is increasingly chat-based, the old arguments about getting your environment and dot-rc files just right fade away. The convenience of starting a task from your phone overwhelms the decades-old bashrc file and finely crafted PS1. As a bonus, you get the ability to share with your co-workers. Pull requests are so yesterday; send them a link to a working demo instead.
Just Test
Exe.dev VMs are a great place to riff on an idea. Perhaps you want to explore a particular open source project. Or you want to do some data analysis and share it with your co-workers? Or prototype your next idea? Or find your flakes by running your tests over and over again. Or let loose Shelley, our agent, on your app with its built-in browser? Or send off a security review. Or even just run a GitHub Actions runner.
Because you pick what access you want to give your VMs, and because they’re persistent, exe.dev VMs are great places to test stuff out.
Just Prod
You can host real, production software in exe. We support custom domains with a bit of DNS configuration (docs).
If you’re incredulous that this is a good idea, the entirety of Stack Overflow ran on just a few machines. Reach out to us if you want to enlarge your VM as far as modern hardware can go.
Private, Internal, or Public
Once you build it, you'll want to share it. You can keep it to yourself, and that's the default. Or you can share it with your team or with share links. Or you can share it publically. Sharing a VM's website is as easy as sharing any other online doc.