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Overview

Blink can connect to Coder workspaces and also has the capability of spinning up its own ephemeral workspaces for short-lived development tasks and code research. These temporary environments are where Blink does most of its heavy lifting for engineering tasks.

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How Ephemeral Workspaces Work

When you give Blink a development task:
  1. Automatic setup: Blink automatically spins up a fresh workspace environment without requiring any manual configuration or setup from you. This happens seamlessly in the background as soon as you request a development task.
  2. Repository cloning: Your GitHub repositories are automatically cloned into the workspace’s virtual memory, giving Blink immediate access to your entire codebase and project history.
  3. Code analysis: Blink can quickly traverse and understand your entire codebase structure, dependencies, and relationships between different components and files.
  4. Task execution: All development work, including code changes, testing, and file generation, happens within this completely isolated environment that doesn’t affect your local machine.

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Workspace Lifecycle

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Active Development

  • Always available: Workspaces remain active and fully responsive while you’re actively working on tasks, ensuring immediate access to all your files and running processes.
  • Complete access: You have full read and write access to all cloned repositories, any files generated during the session, and all created assets or build artifacts.
  • Live sharing: Blink provides real-time preview links for any running applications or websites, plus instant download links for any files created during your development session.

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Sleep Mode

  • Automatic sleep: Workspaces automatically enter sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity to conserve computational resources while preserving all your work and session state.
  • Cost protection: This sleep functionality helps manage compute costs during idle periods while ensuring that all your progress and files remain safely stored and accessible.
  • Easy wake-up: Sleeping workspaces can be quickly restarted within the 24-hour window to resume exactly where you left off, with all files and processes restored to their previous state.

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Destruction

  • 24-hour persistence: Workspaces persist for a full 24 hours after your last activity, giving you ample time to return to your work or retrieve any important files you may have created.
  • Automatic cleanup: After the 24-hour window expires, workspaces are completely destroyed and all resources are freed up to prevent unnecessary resource consumption and costs.
  • Save your work: Any important work should be committed to your repositories or downloaded before destruction to ensure that valuable changes and files are preserved permanently.

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What You Can Do

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Download Assets

Blink can provide direct download links for files created in the workspace: 
Can you create a deployment script and give me a download link your workspace?

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Preview Applications

Get live preview links for websites or applications built in the workspace: 
I've built a React app - can you give me a preview link to see it running?

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Code Research

Analyze large codebases without local setup: 
Clone my entire microservices architecture and analyze the authentication flow

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Troubleshooting

If preview or download links stop functioning:
  1. Check if the workspace has gone to sleep
  2. Ask Blink to restart the workspace (if within 24 hours)
  3. Start a new workspace and pull down your remote branch to continue working

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Expected Workspace Behavior

  • Ephemeral nature: These workspaces are not designed for long-running projects that require persistent state or ongoing development across multiple days or weeks.
  • 24-hour limit: Plan your development tasks accordingly, especially for extended work that might span multiple days or require long-term persistence.
  • Sleep behavior: Preview and download links become inactive during sleep periods, requiring you to ask Blink to restart the workspace to regain access to running applications and assets.

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Best Practices

  • Commit frequently: Push important changes to your repositories regularly throughout your development session to avoid losing valuable work when the workspace is destroyed.
  • Use for short tasks: These environments are ideal for prototyping, code research, and quick development sprints rather than ongoing projects that require long-term persistence.
  • Plan timing: Be aware of the 24-hour lifecycle when planning longer tasks or work that might require multiple sessions to complete.

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For Long-Running Projects

If you need persistent development environments, consider Coder Cloud Development Environments for long-running, persistent workspaces that don’t have the ephemeral limitations.