Bringing exe.dev's Shelley into mid-2026
I have been using exe.dev more and more over the past few weeks. So much of work today is summoning experimental software, and exe makes experimentation and sharing so seamless.
I wind up using the built in shelley coding agent quite a bit because it is machine scoped, installed by default, and easy to drive through the mobile app. I can quickly fire off directives while waiting at the doctor's office, and 3 VMs will start working.
On desktop though the interface is somewhat janky and it is tough to bop between threads on different machines while things are happening in parallel.
What's embarrassing for them is that there is a fashionable standard form for coding AI (mid 2026) and shelley does not match it. If you've used the codex, claude code, cursor, t3 code or other apps you are familiar with this design. Threads grouped by project on the left, conversation in the middle, and artifacts on the right. All wrapped in an electron app with flat colours, sans-serif fonts, lightly rounded corners, and tasteful monochrome icons.
So I asked cursor to build that for exe/shelley. VMs are functionally the projects in exe, so that is the grouping, and the output is usually a website hosted at
It's called diodati (a place to collect Shelleys). It is an electron app.
I didn't type any of the code myself, but the architecture of exe.dev made this very simple to build and easy to use.
You don't have to log in because exe runs on SSH. The app can immediately see all your available VMs and list them for you. All your shelley conversations are right there on the VM where you left them. Chat sessions authenticate through that same ssh auth.
The embedded browser session is automatically authenticated, because ssh exe.dev browser gives you a magic link.
When I share a VM with a team member they can see and continue my existing shelley conversations on that machine. This is huge when prompts and agent threads are where most work happens. When we are vibe-prototyping we need multiple people to be able to drive the prompt and see the result.
If you want to try out exe you should consider using my invite link. You can try it for free for a month, and if you upgrade we both get 2gb of extra ram. I haven't checked but I think that is approximately $1000 of value these days.