iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 27/09/2026

When in doubt, build something.

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Reposted by David Crawshaw

Philip Z @philz.dev · 31/08/2026

The Joel Test was 26 (!) years ago. I revisited it at blog.exe.dev/revisiting-j.... What questions did I leave out?

blog.exe.dev

Revisiting Joel's Test - exe.dev blog

Joel Spolsky's twelve questions still hold, but agents demand nine more. Call it the Shelley test.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 20/08/2026

I think that’s the right question! We are trying to find that line. I don’t think it’s useful to open source exe’s core internals because it’s not easy to run so there’s no easy modification. But a lot on top of the core can be open. How to do it is tricky, but we want to.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 02/08/2026

Not sure what happened, investigating. Published again!

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Justin Garrison @justingarrison.com · 30/07/2026

I told someone about @exe.dev today and told them not to google it. Open a terminal and just ssh. It's the 🤯 moment I love to see

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 29/07/2026

The hardest part of developing little programs for yourself right now is setting up an environment to run them. This is the idea of @exe.dev, open the app on your phone, start typing, you have a program on a durable Linux sandbox.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 29/07/2026

Billing turns out to be a fascinating async database replication problem.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 28/07/2026

Hmm, @exe.dev rendered as a blue link during the preview, but not now it has posted. Bug in the BlueSky UI. Let me just find the edit post button...

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exe @exe.dev · 22/07/2026

PSA: You can now interact with your VM on Slack blog.exe.dev/run-a-slack-...

blog.exe.dev

Run a Slack Bot from Your VM (Without Giving It the Keys) - exe.dev blog

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Vishnu Gopal @vishnugopal.com · 24/07/2026

Trying out @exe.dev and it's so cool! Built a website for my wife in about 10 minutes. Easy for her to edit too since it's wired up to ChatGPT. You just ask it to make changes and it does. There's also something magical about executing commands like this: `ssh exe.dev share set-public <vm-name>`

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 22/07/2026

For those curious about how to bring @exe.dev to work, here is how Antithesis did it.

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exe @exe.dev · 21/07/2026

Built a distributed DNS server in ~a week. Rebuilt twice on purpose. Shipped -> went on vacation. DNS incidents a month later: 0. How we did it (hint: the answer isn't vibe-coding): blog.exe.dev/claude-is-no...

blog.exe.dev

Claude Is Not a Compiler - exe.dev blog

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Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 14/07/2026

Setting up Gerrit on @exe.dev with X-ExeDev-Email auth took 60s! However, that doesn't make git work. I hacked together a little proxy that does a tiny amount of OAuth2, exchanging exe.dev auth in the browser for a token that works with git-credential-oauth.

github.com

GitHub - filippo-claude/gerrit-exedev-auth-proxy: Authenticate Gerrit web and Git smart HTTP with exe.dev OAuth

Authenticate Gerrit web and Git smart HTTP with exe.dev OAuth - filippo-claude/gerrit-exedev-auth-proxy

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Reposted by David Crawshaw

exe @exe.dev · 14/07/2026

We're going to be sharing more about how people use exe to build cool stuff. First up—a conservationist who turned 40 terabytes of public data into a video game: blog.exe.dev/meet-the-con...

blog.exe.dev

Meet the Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data Into a Video Game - exe.dev blog

Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.

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Justin Garrison @justingarrison.com · 11/07/2026

New episode of @fafo.fm with @crawshaw.io about @exe.dev scheduled for Monday Have some more outages included in the newsletter. If you like reading those kinds of things subscribe at sub.fafo.fm

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Reposted by David Crawshaw

Kevin Stewart @kstewart.me · 08/07/2026

I’ve been considering buying a new Mac mini or Mac Studio (yes, yes… I’m aware of the price increases) but after reading this I might just stick with my MacBook Air and just use @exe.dev

blog.exe.dev

Building Software From My Phone - exe.dev blog

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Will Gorman @willgorman.net · 05/07/2026

Used exe.dev to build and host my first custom Bluesky feed: bsky.app/profile/will... so that I don't miss any great baseball goofs. I was worried it might use a good bit of my vcpu quota but consuming the jetstream is way less resource intensive than I would have guessed

exe.dev

exe.dev - ssh exe.dev

Build apps or SSH into a persistent Linux VM. ssh exe.dev.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 07/07/2026

Full post: blog.exe.dev/building-sof...

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Philip Z @philz.dev · 03/07/2026

Using exe.dev with a ChatGPT subscription just got easier! blog.exe.dev/chatgpt-subs...

Diagram of how Shelley (a coding agent) discovers LLM models it can talk to.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 27/06/2026

the ui-over-ssh that sticks in my mind is ssh.chat!

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 27/06/2026

All these "clientless" compute options appearing over SSH. Someone tried to sell me one today in an HN comment thread. Truly, the sincerest form of flattery.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 27/06/2026

It’s the “Camera” in Canon font that I love.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 27/06/2026

I am convinced that commercial LLM offerings are bad at writing as a side effect of their post-training. I saw better writing from open base models 18 months ago. I cannot even trust a "frontier" model to write dev docs. More evidence we need a future of many models.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

I disagree in several ways but let me say that I really disagree with: "NYC can wait until others invent and prove it". America's job is being out front. NYC is not an exception. Waymo have demonstrated they know what they are doing and claim they are ready. The city should get out of their way.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

one of the amazing things about autonomous vehicles is how they make human drivers around them better drivers. you see a waymo in sf actually stop at the stop sign, which means the human behind them rolls the stop sign at a slower speed.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

nyc fighting waymo is like reading about people who used to fight seatbelts. every time I see young children cross at the intersection near my house where a pedestrian was killed earlier this year, I wish autonomous vehicles were in my neighborhood.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

it’s this counter-intuitive thing that a hard ban is easier to fight. you can elect a person or overturn a law. a paperwork ban can survive any single direct action. it comes out of the ether, a department of people or committee with no person to blame.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

that is fair and I’ll cheer tomorrow if nyc cuts a deal for safer cars like waymo. but no one really bans new housing, developers just never get permits. the nastiest ban is slow rolling paperwork.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

Exactly how effective you can be depends on many factors. E.g. I was effective by large company standards when I worked there, by their measures. You get more resources and more constraints. But I am net more effective in smaller, high-trust organizations, so I suspect I will stick to them.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

This is a limit of large human institutions. A large group cannot trust its own people, because large groups include bad people. So you have to build in checks and enforce them. But some people cannot operate effectively under those constraints. So some of the best people stick to small teams.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 24/06/2026

To get good value out of agents you need a good development cycle. For an iOS app that means: while you are playing with the app, see a bug, you flip over to the agent, explain the problem, and then your app is updated with the fix. It's a REPL for iOS dev. Takes a lot of setup.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 22/06/2026

I get to this website by going to the URL bar and typing bs

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Reposted by David Crawshaw

Philip Z @philz.dev · 16/06/2026

Me, reaping: *startled* *fart noises emanating from Mac* TEN MIN PRIOR Me, sowing: "Shelley, build an iPad sound machine; test with the simulator." THIRTY MIN PRIOR "I learned how to build iPad apps at work; kids, what shall we make?" TODAY exe.dev has an iOS app blog.exe.dev/ios

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 15/06/2026

there is a exe.dev iOS app now. it’s my favorite way to program.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 12/06/2026

It makes me really happy to think of all the people who went into aerospace, not because they saw it as a path to wealth but as a way to do something that needed doing, also ending up with a financial windfall. They deserve the win.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 12/06/2026

Might make sense with ion engines. Very low thrust, they run for months. (Please don’t sign me up for defending space movies though, they are all silly.)

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 12/06/2026

New day, new integration: bring your ChatGPT subscription to exe. Power Shelley with it for all your VMs.

A screenshot that shows the exe.dev ChatpGPT integration.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 07/06/2026

While I am waiting for test timing data (I need to find some more computers), have a blog post. blog.exe.dev/replace-your...

blog.exe.dev

Replace your CI with a merge queue - exe.dev blog

Agent development means after-the-fact CI no longer works.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 07/06/2026

Went hunting for why an end-to-end test was so slow. Found a wait loop that looked like it could be prodded by the test to speed it up. Doing so broke the test! Hours later, I have it: a subtle KVM entry/exit accounting bug in the production code. End-to-end tests are the way.

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 07/06/2026

Oh! So I think I typed out “https:// …” without the space, and then Overly Helpful Software did the rest

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 06/06/2026

Just discovered that curl has a --json flag. Instead of: curl-X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{...}' ... you can write curl --json '{...}' ...

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David Crawshaw @crawshaw.io · 01/06/2026

These days I copy a VM instead of creating a git branch.

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Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 31/05/2026

Phenomenally impressed with exe.dev so far. Moved a few of my sites over to it. It’s definitely early, some bumps and blips here and there, but I completely see the vision. Not sponsored but I do have invites for a free month if you wanna try it. Don’t think I get anything for you using them.

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