I have just now learned about exe.dev and it looks awesome.

I really hate that modern development means not having persistent disk. I’m glad there are new options coming out which let you do this in and easier way than managing my own EC2 instances!

Could you clarify what this actually is?

Would I think of this as an EC2 instance which automatically and quickly scales to zero, with pricing only for resources consumed? (CPU and RAM when up, and disk all the time?)

Yeah that's about right.

It's a fast starting and fast pausing persistent VM, with a ton of built in developer tools (including a preconfigured Claude Code) and an extra JSON API for executing commands within it so you can treat it as a sandbox.

You may find my writeup here useful: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/

I wrote an article on how to model a ledger with a DB. https://www.jaygoel.com/posts/building-a-scalable-accounting...

It addresses how to model dr/cr in a DB with positive and negative numbers, but still produce reports with positive numbers as expected

It depends on the “normal balance” of the account.

For Asset and Expense accounts, yes. For Liabilities, Equity, and Revenue it is the opposite.

Isn’t this the nature of all software abstractions? They often introduce a less performant way of executing a task at the tradeoff of user convenience?

I’m building a netsuite competitor (having spent a lot of my career on accounting and erp implementations.)

The trick (one trick) is to allow LLMs to provide an audit/accounting/compliance playbook, along with customizations, based on the user describing their business model.

The source code itself.

If an LLM can read the source of the library you’re trying to use - or examples of others using the library in GitHub, or official documentation - then there is less of a need for a fellow SOer to put the pieces together to debug issues and answer questions.

How do you use these in practice? Both Python and Go don’t make it easy to link a different variation of SQLite with one of these plugins compiled in. How do you make it work?

I don't think SqliteMultipleCiphers can be built into a runtime loadable extension (and the Turso thing is just a copy of it).

I'm confident that a scheme based on tweakable block cyphers (like Adiantum or AES XTS) could be made into decent runtime loadable extension.

I implemented such schemes for my Go driver, but Go code is not really ideal to make a runtime loadable extension of (it'd have to be ported to C/Rust/zig).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208800

Nice! Some feedback from my wife, who is into all manner of word games: she found it a little bit brute-forcey: needing to try all different combinations in order to get the right configuration of the word. In contrast to a crossword where there is already a layout, which gives her a hint for how to proceed with the rest.

(She finished today's puzzle, and I gave up.) From a UI perspective it is very slick - very smooth, and I like how it kind of "gets" what you were trying to do when providing corrections/hints.

>In contrast to a crossword

there's a type of crossword called "diagramless" where you have the numbered clues and an empty grid

there was one in NYTimes Magazine Sunday puzzle page this past weekend

Thats great feedback, thank you!

I'm trying to build a next gen quickbooks competitor.

Something that doesn't nickle and dime you, very cheap (perhaps even open source), has all of the extensibility of a modern ERP, a great UI, and handles complex use cases (revenue rec, expense management, inventory cogs, etc).

I feel like this is solving a real problem, but have no idea how to break into the industry. Just trying to solve my own problems for business accounting but would be nice to know other folks would be interested.