When the internet was still fairly young, I managed to convince a local ISP to let me bring my old computer to their server room so I could run my own server. It was amazing.
The coolest thing was chatting with people on IRC with a verified domain name, and using screen (the predecessor to tmux) to keep your nickname from being stolen while you slept. Identity theft was different back then.
I could just SSH to my server and do stuff. There was no provider, no console, no dashboard, no billing alerts. Just my computer on the internet.
Somewhere along the way that feeling got lost. The cloud arrived and brought complexity along with it. Powerful, yes, but the feeling of “I have a computer on the internet” was buried under so many layers of indirection that I mostly stopped thinking of any of it as mine.
Until I found exe.dev, and the feeling is back.
You SSH to exe.dev to create an account. Once in, you can spin up a VM from the terminal in a few seconds, give it a hostname, and SSH straight into it. That’s it. You have a fresh Linux box with your public key already loaded.
This site you’re reading is running on one of those VMs. The whole setup, from “I want a blog” to “here’s the URL”, was maybe two hours of pottering, most of which was bikeshedding fonts and arguing with a CSS mask.
For the setup, I used pi.dev, a minimal CLI agent harness. It’s shaped the same way exe.dev is: no UI, no ceremony, just a terminal. The aesthetics line up. But that’s a separate love letter. This one is for exe.dev.
What I love is that the abstraction layer has been folded back into the smallest possible thing. A box. A shell. A domain. Concepts that have been stable since 1995. They didn’t have to invent a new noun. There’s no dashboard for me to forget how to navigate in three months, no console to log out of, no SDK to keep up with. The computer is the product. The computer was always the product.
It’s a little bit like that ISP server room. Someone else handles the power and the network. I handle the box. The internet feels like mine again.
For the avoidance of doubt: I have no affiliation with exe.dev.