Also there's a funny little Easter egg within the SSH connection to exe.dev, if you look closely. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it was nice to see.
HN user
dizzled
Turns out the request is coming from localhost because it's being forwarded over SSH. Their HTTP proxy causes a new SSH connection to be made to the VM:
Connection from 10.42.0.1 port 37456 on 10.42.1.75 port 22 rdomain ""
debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_9.9
debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version Go
debug1: compat_banner: no match: Go
Which then requests a local TCP connection, in this case to port 8000: debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2.
debug1: server_init_dispatch
debug3: receive packet: type 90
debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype direct-tcpip rchan 0 win 2097152 max 32768
debug1: server_request_direct_tcpip: originator 0.0.0.0 port 0, target 127.0.0.1 port 8000
debug1: connect_next: start for host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000)
debug2: fd 7 setting O_NONBLOCK
debug2: fd 7 setting TCP_NODELAY
debug1: connect_next: connect host 127.0.0.1 ([127.0.0.1]:8000) in progress, fd=7
debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK
debug3: fd 7 is O_NONBLOCK
debug1: channel 0: new direct-tcpip [direct-tcpip] (inactive timeout: 0)
debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm direct-tcpip
debug3: channel 0: waiting for connection
This is in contrast to a normal SSH shell session: debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2.
debug1: server_init_dispatch
debug3: receive packet: type 90
debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype session rchan 0 win 2097152 max 32768
debug1: input_session_request
debug1: channel 0: new session [server-session] (inactive timeout: 0)
debug2: session_new: allocate (allocated 0 max 10)
debug3: session_unused: session id 0 unused
debug1: session_new: session 0
debug1: session_open: channel 0
debug1: session_open: session 0: link with channel 0
debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm session
debug3: send packet: type 91
debug3: receive packet: type 98
debug1: server_input_channel_req: channel 0 request pty-req reply 1
debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0
debug1: session_input_channel_req: session 0 req pty-req
debug1: Allocating pty.Also curious about Shelley, their LLM agent. Turns out it makes requests to a proxy for https://fireworks.ai APIs via http://169.254.169.254/gateway/llm, such as:
POST /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1
Host: 169.254.169.254
User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
Content-Length: 491
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Bearer implicit
Content-Type: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip
{"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Generate a short, descriptive slug (2-6 words, lowercase, hyphen-separated) for a conversation that starts with this user message:\n\nhello\n\nThe slug should:\n- Be concise and descriptive\n- Use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens\n- Capture the main topic or intent\n- Be suitable as a filename or URL path\n\nRespond with only the slug, nothing else."}],"max_tokens":8192}
And, perhaps of more interest, actual conversations which start with the system prompt: POST /gateway/llm/_/gateway/fireworks/inference/v1/chat/completions HTTP/1.1
Host: 169.254.169.254
User-Agent: Go-http-client/1.1
Content-Length: 10513
Accept: application/json
Authorization: Bearer implicit
Content-Type: application/json
Accept-Encoding: gzip
{"model":"accounts/fireworks/models/qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct","messages":[{"role":"system","content":"You are Shelley, a coding agent and assistant. You are an experienced software engineer and architect. You communicate with brevity.\n\nYou have access to a variety of tools to get your job done. Be persistent and creative.\n\n
...
Truncated as it's huge, but here's a copy of the request data: https://victory-george.exe.xyz. Interesting to see the range of tools offered by the agent.Looks like it's a combination of SSH server IP address + public key.
Each VM you create (up to 25 of them) gets a different CNAME record of the form s0NN.exe.xyz where NN ranges from 01 to 25. Each of these names, from s001.exe.xyz to s025.exe.xyz, resolves to a different IP address.
Therefore the individual VM can be distinguished this way, and the account they are associated with can be identified using the SSH public key that is used to authenticate.