What I Want to Tell You About Orbs

If I were to tell you the ingredients of a meal - ground beef, salt, pepper, cheese, flour, water, yeast, sugar, butter, egg - would that make you hungry?

If I were to spell out how I cook it — turn the beef into two loosely packed balls; heat up a flat-top griddle so long it makes you wonder whether it won’t defy the laws of physics and start to glow; drop the meat on the griddle and flatten it by smashing a metal spatula down with all the force you have; season; wait thirty seconds; scrape it off the griddle, flip, throw cheese on it, wait again; lift and transfer to a bun made out of flour, water, yeast, sugar, butter, and egg through a combination of mixing, kneading, resting, shaping, baking, splitting, toasting — would your mouth then start salivating? Would your stomach produce that low involuntary sound that actually makes you realize your mouth started salivating and that the animal part of your brain has been activated?

Probably not.

But suppose I tell you this: patties thin enough for their edges to turn dark and brittle while the insides remain juicy; patties with a crust that crackles when you bite through it; cheese that no longer lies on top of the meat but has melted into it, filling every crusty crevice; a buttered bun that’s been toasted to just the right color, right to the point before something black would show; the whole thing so hot that you have to breathe through your mouth after you take a bite, so greasy that you wipe your chin after the first bite but don’t do that anymore after the second one because who cares. Then you might think: god damn, I could go for a burger right now.

Now.

That’s the riddle I have to solve with orbs. How do I make you salivate?

I can give you the ingredients: secure sandbox; scale to zero; ephemeral; durable agent loop; controllable from web, phone, desktop; the best of the best models; preview portals, terminal, file editor, review panel; multiplayer support; automations.

But does that make you yearn?

So do I describe the results to you? The meal? That we ship more than ever, with more confidence? That we now tackle things remotely we could’ve sworn require a local environment? That we’ve seen agents do things we thought to be impossible even 4 weeks ago? That there’s basically very very few things left that require a local dev environment? That we think this is the next big change, a bigger change possibly than coding agents themselves?

I could. But you wouldn’t believe me, would you? You’d think I’m showing you the cookbook cover: a trick, an illusion, a show put on with a lighting setup that cost more than our cars, and the food’s been cold for hours, held together with toothpicks, brushed with oil so it keeps glistening in those lights, and then photographed with the latest Food Shooter Pro camera. Looks nice, but it’s not real.

So let me try something else.

Let me tell you what I do with orbs.

Plural: orbs. Because I spawn so many of them. If you had told me two months ago that it’s friction that holds me back from creating new checkouts and worktrees, I’d have told you to git good and that you’re a sucker and that I can type this sentence faster than you can read it.

And yet it’s true. Now that I don’t have to worry about any of this — not how many checkouts I have, nor whether some of them have changes in them, or whether there’s processes conflicting or ports being already open — I spawn so many more agents. So many! God! Every time I see a papercut I take a screenshot, start an agent in an orb and let it rip. No friction at all. It’s, well … lube like?

So, I do more. I spawn more agents.

But here’s the other thing:

I make the agents in the orbs go further.

And again, eight weeks ago I would’ve grinned and shaken my head. “Nah, pal, an agent can’t go this far. It’ll run into an issue and give.” But it can. They can! Those many many agents in these many many orbs. The models are there now.

Now, with orbs, when I see that the agent has produced 800 lines of code I first let out the sigh that we’ve all sighed these last two years but then I remember: wait, it’s in an orb, I don’t give a damn how long this runs, because it doesn’t take up resources nor space on my machine. It doesn’t matter how many ports it takes up, or whether it spawns four browsers. It’s in the orb! So I tell the agent in the orb: “I want you to give me 100% proof that what you did works. Test this end to end. In many ways. Run through a matrix of test cases. Show me a screenshot, a video, anything that’s solid proof! Dazzle me.”

And you know what happens? It fucking goes and does it. Let me repeat: it goes and does it.

The agent runs for eight, ten, twenty, sometimes thirty minutes and tests the hell out of what I had it build. And I can close my laptop or put my phone with the agent’s avatar back in my pocket.

It didn’t take up anything! No checkout, no ports, no browser, nothing! I mean, sure, it took an orb, but there’s infinite orbs, and can you take up infinity? Nah.

Think of all the times you stood in front of what the agent had built and wondered: is this even working? How do I even begin to review this? Jeez, so much code.

But if the agent comes with proof? A mountain of code, but proof that it works — irrefutable proof that it ran through every use case and every edge case; a screenshot, a table of screenshots, before and after pictures, a demo video?

It changes things, massively.

Now you might think: that’s cute, but what I do can’t be screenshotted! Buddy: it can. I asked an agent in an orb to run a Rust desktop app in a freaking headless remote sandbox and guess what, it sent me back a fucking demo video of the app running. How? Beats me. Something something ffmpeg?

It truly is impressive.

Here’s what you get with orbs: more agents building more complicated things; agents running for longer and giving better proof that what they did works; a lighter, less sigh-inducing review load; more things shipped, faster.

Now I just need to figure out how to make you believe me.