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Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

hoplite.sh

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Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#31

Post by BenceRed »

Bnjoroge wrote: post #30

What’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.

This is still something we're working on making seamless. The current approach is to install our MCP server and ask the local agent to start up a new thread on Hoplite when you want to transition to the cloud, but it doesn't carry over file system changes. (Unless you first push the contents to a remote branch, at which point the Hoplite agent can pull it down.)

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#33

Post by scottydelta »

BenceRed wrote: post #28
scottydelta wrote: post #24

Trying 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 conta…

That setup is pretty much what we're trying to offer with Hoplite! Using us means losing freedom and control with regards to infrastructure, however we think that's a tradeoff people would want to make in exchange for easier onboarding and a more polished experience.

Makes sense. It took me some experimentations with a few open source libraries and docker-compose to arrive at my setup. My setup also requires me to access agents via a terminal app on my phone so it's nice to have a web app like your offering.

Are you offering browser access to the agents in your setup?

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#34

Post by BenceRed »

abtinf wrote: post #32

Why would I use this over exe.dev?

exe.dev works quite well for giving an agent a computer and managing it remotely, but seems to require a fair bit more configuration to achieve parity with what we offer out of the box. Namely automations, PR autofix, visual QA, and general UI/UX polish.

I think it comes down to whether configuration or ease of use is valued more, and Hoplite favours the latter a bit more. (They shouldn't really be mutually exclusive, but we have a long way to go before we're happy claiming that we match/beat self-hosting in that area)

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#35

Post by asdev »

just 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.

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#36

Post by BenceRed »

scottydelta wrote: post #33
BenceRed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That setup is pretty much what we're trying to offer with Hoplite! Using us means losing freedom and control with regards to infrastructure, however we think that's a tradeoff people would want to make in exchange for easier onboarding and a more polished experience.

Makes sense. It took me some experimentations with a few open source libraries and docker-compose to arrive at my setup. My setup also requires me to access agents via a terminal app on my phone so it's nice to have a web app like your offering. Are you offering browser access to the agents in your setup?

Yes, agents have a persistent Chromium session they use via the agent-browser CLI. Typical workflow would involve starting the preview, seeding data, then the agent going through the old and new UX flows for a before + after view. We've also got some optimisations around saving the aforementioned flows in a QA library, so that they can be replayed without needing an agent to run through it all again.

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#37

Post by BenceRed »

asdev wrote: post #35

just 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.

Agreed that at the moment it's a very difficult problem, but one we're looking to solve! I think it becomes a no-brainer for most people if we're able to give each agent a replica of their production stack.

What does your current setup look like? And are you using an open source solution like OpenInspect for your in-house version, or building it from the ground up?

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#38

Post by BenceRed »

nzjrs wrote: post #29

Your website text reads like Claude slop

Agreed, we're working with a designer and are going to be fixing this very soon. Our main focus has been on making sure the product itself looks and feels very good to use -- probably not the best approach from a marketing POV.

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#39

Post by asdev »

BenceRed wrote: post #37
asdev wrote: post #35

just 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.

Agreed that at the moment it's a very difficult problem, but one we're looking to solve! I think it becomes a no-brainer for most people if we're able to give each agent a replica of their production stack. What does your current setup look like? And are you using an open source solution like OpenInspect for your in-house version, or building it from the ground up?

Building from ground up using OpenAI Agents SDK. We already have custom in house Cloud Development Environment, so the effort is just to "agent-ize" though which is not small. That's why I feel any team with any sort of infra support likely won't buy your product, since they already have the tribal knowledge to set this up. Newer teams might. But overall porting people's dev envs into the cloud is a tarpit problem(IMO), I was interested in this space too but decided against it for that reason. Happy to be proven wrong though!

Re: Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

#40

Post by kristianc »

>> It opens a pull request >> Then keeps iterating as review comments land, in the same thread, with the same context.

My experience, particularly with Sol is that agents are generally really bad at knowing when to stop 'iterating' and will continue covering off ever-more obscure edge cases. How does Hoplite solve for this?

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