Our Best Customers Are Now Robots

Source: fly.io Date: 2025-04-10 URL: https://fly.io/blog/fuckin-robots/

Summary

Essay by Kurt Mackey reflecting on an unexpected platform shift: Fly.io’s fastest-growing usage segment is now AI/LLM agent systems (“robots”), not human developers. The post details what robots need that Fly is uniquely positioned to provide: fast VM start/stop cycles (billing pauses when stopped), filesystem storage for stateful iteration, request routing control for persistent MCP connections, and OAuth token delegation via secrets. The irony: Fly’s DX investments (flyctl launch, containerization tooling) are irrelevant to agents, which build fresh from scratch.

Implications

Machines API as agent-runtime substrate — the defining signal. This is the most important fly.io signal in the batch. Mackey is describing a demand-pull: agents are arriving on the platform without being explicitly invited, finding that Fly’s VM economics fit their workload profile better than competitors. The four agent needs he identifies map directly to Fly’s infrastructure: fast boot (Firecracker), storage (volumes + Litestream), routing (fly-proxy stateful connections), secrets (Macaroon-attenuated tokens). The “fuckin robots” framing is genuine — they didn’t plan for this, which makes the demand signal more credible. Watch whether Fly builds explicit agent-first primitives (Sprites are the first step) or continues to serve the demand reactively.