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Orbs
- swiftcoder 2mo agoCan anyone name a non-threatening orb? All the orbs are can think of are decidedly palantir-like - ostensibly useful, but corrupted by dark magics...
- hexomancer 2mo agoI think very soon big LLM providers (OpenAI et. al.) will provide a service like this. With the LLMs becoming faster, the agentic task completion bottleneck will soon move to the tool calls (both execution time and round-trip latency), so it makes sense to have a server host the project very close to the actual LLM doing the inference in order to minimize latency.
- iainmerrick 2mo agoAnthropic has Claude Code Web -- sorry, looks like the official name is "Claude Code on the web" -- which I think is basically this? I've been using it for a while and I really like it. Nothing to do with latency, I think, it's all about convenience and safety. I don't have to worry about running an agent on the computer that knows all my admin API tokens and SSH keys, and the agent isn't interrupted if I close my laptop. The one thing that might be useful is the ability to run on a beefier machine when you need it, e.g. make sure it has direct access to a GPU. But then you're back to thinking about the host VM, not fully abstracting away from it.
- josevalerio 2mo agoOpenAI already does this with Codex cloud https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud From my experience, Orbs have been more consistent, along with Cursor's agents
- stillpointlab 2mo agoAlso, they can literally train the LLM inside the VM they create so it becomes an expert in whatever tools are there. And since they control the entire sandbox, less permission issues are likely. I think they will become extremely vertical integrated sooner or later because that will be the most efficient and effective way to do this. I'm guessing anyone building this kind of thing now has only one hope: acquisition.
- fwlr 2mo agoSo this product is a thin wrapper over a remote virtual machine, a new name for remote virtual machines, and an exhortation to not look inside or reason about remote virtual machines? I feel like up until recently this would been pitched as “the missing UX/DX for cloud compute”, or something. But instead now it’s marketed to this new trend where one should aggressively not understand the tower of abstractions one is standing on. Odd.
- andai 2mo agoThis is Apple's entire business model. Also most proprietary software, also most web-based software, also most APIs... also what my plumber does when I call him over! (Also most hardware?)
- fwlr 2mo agoI suppose it is only a new trend in engineering, not in the broader world.
- MarkWayneNewton 2mo agoSimulacra and simulation.
- davidbalbert 2mo agohttps://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i... > No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 > I have a few qualms with this app: > 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software Obviously I'm not claiming that this will be anywhere near as successful as the iPod or Dropbox. It might not succeed at all. But I would have thought we'd be past this sort of dismissal by now.
- dist-epoch 2mo ago
- andai 2mo agoWell they nailed the headline: make the reader go "wtf is Orbs" so they have to click on it.
- cassianoleal 2mo agoWtf is Orbs?
- jmiskovic 2mo agoA brand name for an agent in VM they spin up for you.
- cassianoleal 2mo agoThanks! Saved me (and hopefully others) a click.
- fishtoaster 2mo agoSame thing as: - "Cloud Agents" on cursor - "Cloud Coding Agents" on Hoplite.sh - "Sessions" in Devin cloud (they don't make a big deal of them being remote) Amp is just trying to pitch an increasingly-commodity experience as a special sauce.
- PinkaDunka 2mo agoThis is ChatGPT Work, right?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rsyring 2mo agoThey've basically come up with what exe.dev has been doing for awhile now? Except, exe.dev is more about, you have a VM and can do LLM work on it. Orbs seems to be minimizing the VM machinery more and making it about the "agentic experience."
- soulofmischief 2mo agoA bunch of people are in this space. I have my own personal cloud stack.
- ramblurr 1mo agoCare to share more about how/what you built?
- rmsaksida 2mo agoReminds me of fly.io's sprites (https://sprites.dev https://sprites.dev), but with a custom-built layer of UI, harness, and features.
- radicalriddler 2mo agoFeels like the tech industry balks at any whimsical introduction of feature names. Reminds me of Tangled’s spindles and knots and HN’s reaction. They’re just names to be used within the context of their parent ecosystem. If it were a general purpose tool, I’d tend to agree.
- nlitened 2mo agoSo Orbs are like Grok Bots, I guess? Now every company has to copy this feature, and name it differently
- tough 2mo agoIm pretty sure Orbs were released before Grok Bot. Also Grok Bot is incidentally just a wrapper for cursor cloud sessions/vm's
- Artoooooor 2mo agoFor you not to waste your precious time - "orb" is just a virtual machine. And the thing requires a phone number, which it tells you at the END of the registration. I have new marketing jingle for that company: "market your AI slop with non-AI slop".
- Barbing 2mo agoI enjoyed the demo vids and seeing the way these VMs are implemented. >requires a phone number…at the END of the registration I do not appreciate that at all. Phone number, understandable, but it better be all the way up front.
- aarondong 2mo agoIt sounds like great engineering, but everyone in the coding agent space is building the same thing. And big labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have more money to burn. Cloud agents that run in VMs are being offered from everyone from VPS and infra companies to the frontier labs.
- anonzzzies 2mo agoYep, and also at the same pricing, so then why not go for established providers?
- jchook 2mo agoI’ve used a few of the hosted VM options for this like Coder and really dislike having to do my work in a web browser. This is why I made ParaSpace (https://paraspace.dev/ https://paraspace.dev/) With ParaSpace I can use a real terminal and my normal tooling to develop locally on fast booting isolated containers. I even get to bring my own dotfiles.
- altschuler 2mo agoTo give another perspective from the generally negative comments here, I've found Orbs to be just fantastic! The "it's just a VM, everybody has that" argument misses the point, the real value lies in just how easy it is to use and the surrounding functionality. Portals, multiplayer, local machine syncing, Puck (something like a meta assistant), referencing threads/Orbs from each other, etc. all just work as you'd hope and expect. It's the best $20/month I'm spending on any dev tools, the Amp coding agent in itself is worth that much (I actually came for that and stayed for the orbs). I can only encourage anyone to give it a try and maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised :)
- theplumber 2mo agoWe all seem to be building this kind of Orbs or whatever you want to call a harness with some user interface. I am at version 4 and I have a “open in vscode” button on each task/orb/instance just in case the UI is not enough and you want to corner the agent really close
- bartleeanderson 2mo agoenshittification all rolled up into a... Pokemon?
- dgellow 2mo agoA pokeball!
- bartleeanderson 2mo agoI apologize, was not conversant with all the Pokestuff. Yes, then a Pokeball has captured Mr. Hanky.