Nördnytt! 🤓Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents
Here’s a demo: https://youtu.be/bnyktZ_9pjE
We got here after pivoting away from the idea we applied to YC with; AI for retail investing. It ultimately wasn’t a product that we ourselves would use, nor served a customer base that we felt connected to. In reflecting on what we really wanted to do, we realised that we loved talking to founders and developers, and were really opinionated about the specific area of cloud agents. We tried out all the existing solutions, and didn’t find one that A) took good advantage of being in the cloud, and B) was performant and felt good to use.
We’re building a product that we feel reflects what mainstream development will look like in 6-12 months. As models improve, developers will end up reviewing less and less code, and will instead focus on reviewing the product output. That means evaluating new user flows, visually verifying that new features look good, that the API works as expected, that the CLI works on Windows, etc. And doing it while running hundreds of agents concurrently.
On the agent side, we’ve created a custom harness. We spent a lot of time deciding on whether we should use an off the shelf solution like Codex/Claude Code, but ultimately wanted the independence and freedom that came with building it in house. It also means that we can test out completely new features without relying on Anthropic and OpenAI to catch up.
Everything is hosted on AWS, with the exception of: Temporal for durable workflows, Modal for sandboxes, and Planetscale for our database. Our infra decisions were driven by a strong belief that agents are becoming a tier 0 piece of infrastructure, and they need the reliability and security to match that.
You can try it now for free with the code ‘HACKERNEWS’ - we’ve included $100 in free credits, plus you can connect your Codex subscription and use OpenAI models via it. You can see some more details around our pricing at https://hoplite.sh/pricing.
At the moment we’re focusing on optimising two key experiences: onboarding and previews, and would love to hear your feedback on them. And if you find that the agent's performance in certain tasks doesn’t match your expectations, please let us know!
- scottydelta - 8656 sekunder sedanTrying to wrap my head around how it differs from my current on-the-go setup that is claude code. On claude's phone app or web app I can choose a repo, ask it for a feature and it writes the code, runs my tests + add more tests and creates a new branch. Then I can click on create PR or configure claude code to auto create PR.
I also have another setup which is a self-hosted docker compose behind my vpn with one container with claude code agents managed using agent of empires[0] and another container with playwright with sse. Using this setup, my agents get access to actual browser where it can test things live and I can access the app started by agent on domain:port. This is something I don't get with Claude. [0] https://github.com/agent-of-empires/agent-of-empires
- fishtoaster - 9104 sekunder sedanTook me a minute to see the value - my first thought was "this is just cursor's cloud agents..."
But the key thing here for me is "Every sandbox boots your app on a live URL." Cursor doesn't easily have that, and that's what would allow me to ditch my local env entirely - the ability to actually try out a PR without needing to check it out locally.
So on that note: how does that work? We've had trouble with getting our dev env running in other cloud envs because it requires a few things (clickhouse, localstack, pg, etc) running which we manage via docker compose locally.
Also, some minor pricing feedback: it'd be really great if there were a version with pay-as-you-go and a cheaper fixed cost. I think your 99/seat/mo model is fine for professional work, but it's a lot to commit to for personal work.
- asdev - 4201 sekunder sedanjust a data point, at my company we are building this internally. if you're targeting people building from scratch it might work, but there's no way you can port any somewhat mature infra stack, nor will the org want to. you'll need to deal with the variable complexity of everyone's dev environment which already doesn't work locally for thousands of different reasons.
- Bnjoroge - 6803 sekunder sedanWhat’s the experience like going from an active on-going thread to a cloud-hosted one? I dont wanna always work on the cloud, and want my current setup to be exactly the same as in the cloud, and should be pretty seamless. Only folks i’ve seen solve these are folks who run the sandboxes locally and take that to the cloud like smolvm/microsandbox.
- r5Khe - 12731 sekunder sedanLooks neat! I've been using Amp (https://ampcode.com/) for a while (Which seems to be doing something very similar), and I really appreciate this type of workflow. One thread = one VM feels like a solid model going forward.
- mellosouls - 14989 sekunder sedanFirstly: good luck!
I've been wondering what the alternatives to things like Github Copilot Cloud and Codex Cloud might be, especially ones that might be flexible wrt models, and this seems at least to have some of those behaviours.
If that perception is correct, please would you explain what it offers against those sorts of services (those in particular) and how the pricing compares - eg. their base levels are $20 a month, yours starts at a higher level - I can see there seems to be more brought in from the local IDE world (and similar), which seems very useful compared to the standard "prompt against repo, repeat" of the normal cloud agents but it would be useful to understand the targets and intents.
- lionls - 12052 sekunder sedanAmazing work, I am currently in the process of building something similar on my server for personal use, but yours looks really promising. Especially running sandboxes on your own can be tedious. Why have you opted for Modal instead of Firecracker or a similar micro VM solution?
Best of luck to you!
- FailMore - 11158 sekunder sedanLooks interesting. Does this mean I would use this as my day to day harness? Or is it something additional to an established workflow?
- abtinf - 6305 sekunder sedanWhy would I use this over exe.dev?
- mkagenius - 13263 sekunder sedanIf you ever need to switch sandboxes, would be happy to chat.
- docheinestages - 13016 sekunder sedanSuggestion: showing an actual screenshot or video of your app is a much better indicator of effort than a generic Claude made animation. I've seen AI slop landing pages on far too many YC-backed startups. Not saying yours is one, but parts of it smell.
- LoganDark - 14904 sekunder sedanNaming conflict with https://www.hoplite.gg
- nzjrs - 6815 sekunder sedanYour website text reads like Claude slop
- abratabia - 11155 sekunder sedan[dead]