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.
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?)
Yes, like many things, Orbs are "wrappers" around VMs, but the point is that some wrappers enable new ways to hold and use and reuse the thing they wrap, and even give you a different perspective on it.
That's what happened with our team once we had Orbs working. We knew beforehand all the things they're made of (fast to start sandboxes, scale to zero, live streaming updates on all clients, one machine per conversation, etc) but what really surprised us was how it changed our workflow by removing friction we didn't even know was there. The friction of creating new checkouts and worktrees and managing local resources -- it sounds trite, of course, but man, once you can stop thinking about it, it's so much better.
So, yes, maybe they're wrappers but hey, some people say the tortilla is what makes it a burrito, you know?
1. auto-refresh base VM snapshots with latest delta of git commit changes
2. extend the VM lifetime when it receives an interaction (chat, HTTP request, etc.) and sleep it when inactive
3. oauth refresh of MCP servers, coding agent subscriptions, etc.
4. support inter-VM and communication for agents and exec commands
5. keeping track of agent work across VMs
A few examples:
Many remote agents products have a "one agent per VM" restriction, but it's better to have N agents across M VMs. For example, I have agents work on a singular VM in parallel worktrees and then stack the worktrees at the end on that VM for the final change.
Just give me OpenSSH with normal SSH key management. Lets you manage VM access the same way we've done it since the 90s.
Connect VMs in a network topology: we build our VM/agent scheduling + remote control product inside itself, so we often test interactions between user, control plane, and sandbox(es). If you can directly control VM creation and lifecycle, it's easy to spin this structure up and let agents work across it.
I should be able to use whichever coding agents I want, connected to the VM. Whether that's OpenCode or Pi Web in the browser, or loading the VM into Cursor or Codex app, or using the TUI or sending messages to agent(s) via API.
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."
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.
Also Grok Bot is incidentally just a wrapper for cursor cloud sessions/vm's