January update

It has been a busy month for exe.dev! We launched in late December and have been hard at work keeping the service online.

Along the way we found some time to ship some features. Of note:

• The new cp command to make a fast copy of a VM to another VM. Under the hood this is implemented as copy-on-write, so no matter how complex your configuration gets, expect your new VM in a couple of seconds.

  This can be a useful way to set up a “base” VM, with the tools and configuration you expect in your development environment. When you need a fresh workspace:

  ssh exe.dev cp yourbase yourbranch

• A restart command in the SSH lobby. Sometimes VMs find themselves in untenable states. This is the first in a set of tools to help you manage the VM externally.

• Rename your VMs after you create them. Naming things is hard, sometimes you need a second take.

• The web UI billing portal! Does this make VMs go faster? No. But can you now clearly see and manage the state of your exe.dev account? Yes.

• Early work on larger disks. We intend to let you self-serve larger disks soon, but until then, support requests for a VM with a larger disk are often answered positively!

• Send email from your VM! Currently you can only send emails to yourself, but even this is surprisingly useful for building small apps that need to notify you. All you need is curl.

• Receive email on your VM! Any email sent to *@vmname.exe.xyz can be delivered directly to your VM, all you need to do is enable it in the lobby:

  ssh exe.dev share receive-email vmname on

• DNS records are now reliably created before the new command completes, so you can write scripts like:

  DOCKER_HOST=ssh://$(ssh exe.dev new --json | jq -r .ssh_dest)  
  docker ps
  

• Dark mode in the web UI, for people whose eyesight is too good.

Shelley

Shelley is the agent we run in the default image, and the one you use if you start a new VM with a prompt. It has seen significant development in January:

• Shelley is now open-source. Give the repo a star and read all about it on our blog. Our default image, exeuntu, is also open source.

• Subagents, as well as a mechanism to continue a conversation in a new context once the context is exhausted.

• Support for custom models, so you can bring your own model keys.

• We added support for skills.

• The diff viewer in the conversation view is now diffs.com, and it’s pretty, if we say so ourselves.

• Shelley can display an iframe with HTML output for your fancy visualizations. Ask Shelley to give you a “vega-lite visualization of the github activity in your repo” or something along those lines…

• It’s pretty fun to type “!git show HEAD” or “!bash” in the chat.

• Shelley can now upgrade itself from the UI.

• The 90s called and there’s a new favicon.

Much more is happening, expect to be seeing more posts like this! You can find us in our discord.