Infrastructure platform Fly.io debuted Sprites, which are persistent, instantly available virtual machine (VM) environments designed to keep AI agents running continuously and efficiently.

Detailed in a blog post penned by CEO Kurt Mackey, Fly.io contends traditional container solutions – what his firm labels as “ephemeral sandboxes” – force agents to rebuild environments every single time, which is wasteful.

Instead, the startup’s Sprites are effectively Linux-based VMs that act as persistent computers. Touted as being capable of booting in seconds with 100-gigabyte (GB) storage capacity, Sprites automatically idle when inactive to stop billing while preserving all state.

A Sprite-based AI agent can install packages once, work on multiple tasks, access logs from running apps, and pick up exactly where it left off, even days after initial switch-on. The platform also offers instant checkpoint and restore functionality, completing in about one second, allowing agents to snapshot their entire system state and roll back quickly.

“Professional software developers are trained to build stateless instances. Stateless deployments, where persistent data is confined to database servers, buys you simplicity, flexible scale-out, and reduced failure blast radius,” Mackey wrote. “It’s a good idea, so popular that most places you can run code in the cloud look like stateless containers. Fly Machines, our flagship offering, look like stateless containers.

“The problem is that Claude isn’t a pro developer. Claude is a hyper-productive five-year-old savant. It’s uncannily smart, wants to stick its finger in every available electrical socket, and works best when you find a way to let it zap itself.”

The CEO argues that agents can be forced to work around containerization, but they’re not suited for that application and instead require a persistent environment that evolves as needed.

“Whether or not you ever boot a Sprite, ask: if you could run a coding agent anywhere, would you want it to look more like a read-only sandbox in a [Kubernetes] cluster in the cloud, or like an entire EC2 instance you could summon in the snap of a finger?" Mackey continued. “I think the answer is obvious. The age of sandboxes is over. The time of the disposable computer has come.”