A real machine, run in the open.

A DevEx workspace is one unprivileged pod, started from a template. It has a shell with a package manager and outbound network, a filesystem synced to object storage so it survives being stopped, a browser editor, and a public URL for anything you serve from inside it. There is no emulator layer and no restricted API in the middle: when you run npm install it is a real install, into a real container, over the real internet.

That is a deliberately unfashionable design. Most browser development tools of the last few years chose a sandbox — faster to start, cheaper to run, and unable to do the one thing you eventually need, which is to run the actual thing and see the actual error.

Setting up a development environment is still the slowest part of picking up someone else’s project, and the least interesting. The gap between “I can read this code” and “I can run this code” is measured in hours and paid by every new contributor, every reviewer checking out a branch, and every person following a tutorial on a laptop configured differently from the author’s.

A workspace defined by a template closes that gap to about twenty seconds, and closes it the same way for everyone. The same property is what makes it useful to an AI agent: an assistant that can execute what it wrote and read the error is doing engineering, and one that can only print code is guessing.

Four pieces, all in one repository. A Next.js web application — this site, the dashboard and the browser IDE. A Go control plane that handles authentication, schedules workspaces onto Kubernetes and copies template filesystems in and out of S3-compatible storage. A Go runner that lives inside each workspace and exposes its filesystem and shell over WebSockets. And an MCP server that hands those same capabilities to an AI assistant as tools.

The architecture guide walks through how a click on “start” becomes a running pod, and self-hosting covers running the whole stack on a cluster of your own.

DevEx is built and maintained by Parth Kapoor. It is a one-person project running on a single cluster, which is worth knowing before you put anything critical on the hosted instance: there is no on-call rotation behind it. The free tier is genuinely free and needs no card, the source is MIT-licensed, and self-hosting is unlimited — so nothing here depends on that cluster staying up forever.

Bugs and feature requests belong in the issue tracker; everything else is on the contact page.