5 posts tagged with "product"

A coding agent out of the box is generic. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini — they all boot up knowing nothing about you, your repos, your conventions, or yesterday's conversation. On Fibe we call the running instance a Genie, and the platform's whole job is to make that generic Genie yours before a single token is generated.

"Yours" isn't one thing: a provider choice, credentials we have to protect, skill files, files you dragged in, and — the part people underestimate — memory of what happened last time. None of that lives in the container; it lives in an Agent, a small, boring, persistent config record the Genie reads from. This post walks through that record, down to how it reaches the container.

Every billing system has a moment it would rather not talk about: the one where the money stops. The card expires, the wallet empties, the trial ends — and now you have an environment that costs real money to keep alive and a customer no longer paying for it. The naive answer is brutal and tempting: tear it down, move on.

We didn't want to build that. Fibe funds a Marquee — your Docker host — out of a daily wallet, and when a day can't be funded, the system enters a deliberate, recoverable sequence rather than a guillotine. This post is about that sequence: the grace incident, the three-day window, the seven-day retention, and the invariant we cared about most — starting grace never marks your billing as paid, and a suspended-but-unrepaid environment can never slip back to "active."

Fibe has a vocabulary problem, and we knew it the day we shipped. A new player signs up and within thirty seconds must hold a half-dozen made-up nouns in their head: Marquees, Props, Playspecs, Playgrounds, Tricks, Crumbs, the Bridge. None mean what they mean anywhere else — you cannot Google "what is a Marquee" and get our answer. The first time someone lands in the app, the dashboard is empty and every label is a word they have never seen, on a concept they do not have.

You can solve that with documentation. We tried. Nobody reads it. So we built an onboarding wizard that walks a brand-new player from a blank account to one real, running environment — teaching the nouns by doing, not reading, and never sending them to a manual.

Every Fibe environment starts as a description before it is ever a running thing. Long before a container exists on a Marquee, before Traefik knows a subdomain, before the wallet is even checked — there is a document that says what this environment is. That document is a Template, and the way Fibe treats it tells you a lot about the platform's whole personality: declarative, versioned, shareable, and unforgiving about typos.

This post is about the authoring layer — what you touch when you decide what an environment should be, not how it gets healed at 3am. We'll walk from a Template to a Playspec to the Bazaar, with stops at variables, the fibe.gg/* config keys, and why unknown keys and unresolved ${...} placeholders hard-fail.

Every Playground on Fibe is born with an expiration date. Spin one up, walk away, and eight hours later it's gone — containers down, volumes reclaimed, the database row deleted. That's not a quota we enforce grudgingly; it's a default we're proud of. Idle environments are a tax everyone pays: they burn compute on a Marquee someone funds daily, pile up as ghost subdomains, and make "what's actually running here?" unanswerable. So we let them die.

But there's exactly one thing we will not do, no matter how expired an environment is: throw away your uncommitted work. If a Playground has dirty files when its clock runs out, the expiry sweep parks it rather than destroying it. This post is about that one rule — and how little code it takes to hold ephemerality and data safety at once.