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Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

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Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#71

Post by zingar »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #8

24/7 running coding agents are pretty clearly the direction the industry is going now. I think we'll need either on-premises or cloud solutions, since obviously if you need an agent to run 24/7 then it can't live on your laptop. Obviously cloud is better for making money, and some kind of VPC or local cloud solution is best for enterprise, but perhaps for individual devs, a self-hosted system on a home desktop comput…

Optimising to keep the coding going 24/7 feels like a local optimisation trap. The amount of code that can be written by coding agents in normal working hours dwarfs what humans can productively describe and assess.

My efforts will be in improving agentic requirements gathering and assessment.

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#72

Post by zingar »

danoandco wrote: post #11
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #8

24/7 running coding agents are pretty clearly the direction the industry is going now. I think we'll need either on-premises or cloud solutions, since obviously if you need an agent to run 24/7 then it can't live on your laptop. Obviously cloud is better for making money, and some kind of VPC or local cloud solution is best for enterprise, but perhaps for individual devs, a self-hosted system on a home desktop comput…

For a solo dev running one task at a time, a beefy desktop overnight is totally viable. We see a lot of this with the Mac Mini hype Cloud starts to matter when you want to (a) run a swarm of agents on multiple independent tasks in parallel, (b) share agents across a team, or (c) not worry about keeping a machine online

And (d) not worry about toddler agents wrecking your single point of failure beefy desktop

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#75

Post by gabriel-uribe »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #26
piker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 24/7 running coding agents are pretty clearly the direction the industry is going now. This assertion needs some support for those of us that don't have a macro insight into the industry. Are you seeing this from within FAANG shops? As a solo developer? What? Honest question.

I'm speaking from my daily experience. Sometimes i don't want to close my laptop before going to bed because there are still 1-2 tasks ongoing in my AI kanban board, so I just leave my laptop open (lock but not suspend it) so that the agents keep working for a while. I don't even have things all that automated. I anticipate that once I have some more complex agentic scaffolds set up to do things like automatically ex…

100% this.

I also have Claude Cowork automations running constantly. As-is, I can't shut down my laptop, and it gets frustrating when my laptop is in my backpack all day because of commutes or travel.

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#76

Post by willydouhard »

wcdolphin wrote: post #67
cocoflunchy wrote: post #58

Great timing as I'm exploring the space to get rid of Cursor in our stack. For local dev everyone is switching to Claude Code or Codex. The state of the art for cloud agents in my opinion right now is Cursor. But their pricing model per-user doesn't make sense when what I want is to enable anyone in the company to fix things in the product. 2 things not immediately clear from your homepage: - do you support full comp…

I’ve been hacking on something in this vein and would love your feedback. What if you could reuse your CI env by using Github Actions as your sandbox. You can reuse the caching, any oidc based roles and self host via runs-on.com for cost and performance. We expose a claude code web experience of interactive low latency chat. I have a working prototype I’m happy to share if you think it would be interesting.

This is very convenient but has limitations. GitHub actions are not built to resume state (conversations in our case) and handle multi player experiences.

However reusing the GitHub workflows out of the box feels really nice

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#77

Post by willydouhard »

kuzivaai wrote: post #68

"The agent can't skip steps" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What happens when the plan itself is wrong? Curious whether the approval gate is genuinely blocking or if teams end up rubber-stamping to avoid being the bottleneck.

There is room for plan adaptation but the agent has to justify and highlight it in the PR.

Defining the plan/acceptance criteria for long running task is the hard part.

We recently added a Ralph loop mode in that spirit. The implementation won't start until the human and agent align on verifiable criteria and a different agent judges if criteria are met at the end of each run.

Overall I think this problem is not yet completely solved and improvement on both the UX and model judgement are needed

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#78

Post by willydouhard »

woeirua wrote: post #62
auszeph wrote: post #33

I built an internal version of this for my workplace. Something very useful that will be harder for you most likely is code search. Having a proper index over hundreds of code repos so the agent can find where code is called from or work out what the user means when they use an acronym or slightly incorrect name. It's quite nice to use and I'm sure someone will make a strong commercial offering. Good luck

Why not connect to the GitHub MCP?

We still need to get an oauth token to connect to GitHub. We started with the GitHub mcp but migrated to giving the gh cli to the agent directly.

One learning we had is that most of the time CLI > MCP

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#79

Post by willydouhard »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #75
2001zhaozhao wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm speaking from my daily experience. Sometimes i don't want to close my laptop before going to bed because there are still 1-2 tasks ongoing in my AI kanban board, so I just leave my laptop open (lock but not suspend it) so that the agents keep working for a while. I don't even have things all that automated. I anticipate that once I have some more complex agentic scaffolds set up to do things like automatically ex…

100% this. I also have Claude Cowork automations running constantly. As-is, I can't shut down my laptop, and it gets frustrating when my laptop is in my backpack all day because of commutes or travel.

Yes or when you get good feedback/idea talking to someone, being able to spawn tasks from your phone makes everything much faster

Re: Launch HN: Twill.ai (YC S25) – Delegate to cloud agents, get back PRs

#80

Post by willydouhard »

ibrahimhossain wrote: post #73

Cloud sandboxes for persistence and parallelization is a smart move. Local setups hit those exact walls very quickly. That feels like the right long term bet as the underlying models keep improving

This definitely feels like the end state. We need to improve models, agent/human UX and make the transition from cloud work to local work seemless to fully get there
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