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Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

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Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#41

Post by yzhong94 »

auszeph wrote: post #40

Built similar for internal use at our work. Slack+JIRA though, not Linear. Otherwise GCP-native like this. I didn't want to be on the hook for supporting an open source version though, so never made it public. Good on you for putting it out there. A few differences I can quickly spot, fwiw... I went with Firestore over Postgres for the lower cost, and use Cloud Tasks for "free" deduping of webhooks. Each webhooks is…

Haha we are definitely like-minded because our internal Broccoli is actually on Firestore. That being said, Firestore is an acquired taste so we rewrote the OSS backend to Postgres so that everything can be deployed in one go with the infra that people are most familiar with.

Re: spot VMs. Great idea! There are two features we have not finished porting to OSS. Internally, we can specify the instance type and timeout, and we also send about 50% of jobs to Blaxel; we find it has a much better cold start compared to Cloud Run. We probably will port the multi-vendor support logic over to OSS soon but wanted to keep v1 simple (and a one-provider magic experience!).

Scheduler is a wish item for us. Curious how you implemented it? Currently, we just have a scheduled Cloud Function during the night to automatically address open PR comments (via the Broccoli GitHub feedback automation) so that the engineer wakes up to a mostly clean PR without needing to do anything. We haven't ported this to the OSS yet because 1) Firebase Cloud Functions, 2) not sure what would be the best ergonomics. Any suggestions here?

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#42

Post by auszeph »

yzhong94 wrote: post #41
auszeph wrote: post #40

Built similar for internal use at our work. Slack+JIRA though, not Linear. Otherwise GCP-native like this. I didn't want to be on the hook for supporting an open source version though, so never made it public. Good on you for putting it out there. A few differences I can quickly spot, fwiw... I went with Firestore over Postgres for the lower cost, and use Cloud Tasks for "free" deduping of webhooks. Each webhooks is…

Haha we are definitely like-minded because our internal Broccoli is actually on Firestore. That being said, Firestore is an acquired taste so we rewrote the OSS backend to Postgres so that everything can be deployed in one go with the infra that people are most familiar with. Re: spot VMs. Great idea! There are two features we have not finished porting to OSS. Internally, we can specify the instance type and timeout,…

Ours currently runs with Cloud Tasks, which involves some cleanup handling if one run fails to enqueue the next.

Originally I had Cloud Scheduler running a heartbeat task every X mins, and the one of the heartbeat tasks was to look for any overdue scheduled tasks and fire them off. So they were not very precise in timing, but a very simple setup.

I made the move to Cloud Tasks so I could heartbeat less often. Now the cleanup happens in the heartbeat - ensure all scheduled tasks have a matching cloud task pending.

Feedback on PRs was an interesting challenge - since we can get it from Slack replies, Github comments, CI failures and we want to be fairly reactive. I ended up leaning on Firestore realtime queries, the harness on the agent VM is subscribed and can interrupt the agentic loop to feed in new feedback as it comes in. All gets very complicated to OSS, but it has helped to get quicker feedback loops going.

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#43

Post by jlian »

> laptops left open just so tasks could keep running

Too real. We’re currently still sticking to local agent workflows which feel more powerful than cloud native ones. Moving that to your own cloud with no third-party control plane feels like the right middle ground. Nice work

EDIT: the adversarial two-agent review loop is really clever!

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#44

Post by yzhong94 »

jlian wrote: post #43

> laptops left open just so tasks could keep running Too real. We’re currently still sticking to local agent workflows which feel more powerful than cloud native ones. Moving that to your own cloud with no third-party control plane feels like the right middle ground. Nice work EDIT: the adversarial two-agent review loop is really clever!

Thank you! We found this approach for both plan critique and code review to be extremely effective

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#48

Post by ManuelKiessling »

xmonkee wrote: post #37

One persistent issue I keep having is preview environments for this kind of stuff. I have the full setup, migrations, database seeding, etc. But having it run off a PR is still kind of a mess with spinning up 2 services, databases, redis etc. Do you guys run into this problem?

I‘ve built https://github.com/dx-tooling/productbuilding-orchestration for more or less the same use case as Broccoli, but in my case a) the „frontend“ is Slack, not a ticket system (but the agent people talk to in Slack manages the ticket system under the hood), and b) everytime there is a new commit on a PR, a preview system is bootstrapped or updated, and the codebase that is to be previewed explains how it wants to be deployed for preview.

This works really well.

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#49

Post by yzhong94 »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #48
xmonkee wrote: post #37

One persistent issue I keep having is preview environments for this kind of stuff. I have the full setup, migrations, database seeding, etc. But having it run off a PR is still kind of a mess with spinning up 2 services, databases, redis etc. Do you guys run into this problem?

I‘ve built https://github.com/dx-tooling/productbuilding-orchestration for more or less the same use case as Broccoli, but in my case a) the „frontend“ is Slack, not a ticket system (but the agent people talk to in Slack manages the ticket system under the hood), and b) everytime there is a new commit on a PR, a preview system is bootstrapped or updated, and the codebase that is to be previewed explains how it wants…

I think it totally depends on the team on what the correct workflow is. The agentic workflow should accelerate what you have instead of asking your team to adopt something new. This is why we think it helps to own the orchestration yourself so you have that level of control!

Re: Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud

#50

Post by yzhong94 »

adamwong246 wrote: post #45

I like everything about this idea but "one-shot". I work _with_ an LLM, but as Wozniak said, "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window". here's my [similar take]( https://github.com/testeranto-dev/testeranto )

I'd say it's one-shot for 60% of the PRs we ship today. As I mentioned in the post, the rest still go through a lot of back and forth especially at the design stage.
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