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.
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 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
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.
Took 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.
Modal just released some features that would allow users to bring custom Docker images, and I'm working on getting your exact use case supported! Aiming to get it out by the end of the week.
Noted the pricing feedback! We're still figuring out exactly what works best so it's still very much so subject to change.
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.)
Looks 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.
Agreed. Per-thread VMs are quite similar to how local agents use worktrees to avoid cross contamination, but with the added benefit of being able to easily scale up/down compute requirements on demand.
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.
Thank you! Regarding models, as you said we're not locked into a specific provider, and are able to offer open weight models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2
Our pricing is higher than other providers because we do not upcharge on token or sandbox costs. We believe that people should be running as many agents as they possibly can handle, and an upcharge would create a monetary incentive for us to say that, when it's a genuine belief we hold.
We also offer features out of the box that would usually be behind enterprise gating (e.g. sandbox baking).
Amazing 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?
Modal has a lot of small niceties that made them easy to implement, such as filesystem snapshots and programmatic build images. But I did see that AWS recently launched Lambda MicroVMs, and since we're an AWS house we may transition to using them.
My main issue with Modal is that their autoscaling is not as good as Daytona's. You have to stop the machine, resize, then start it, which takes ~3s and terminates all running processes. Daytona supports scaling up (but not down) without stopping the VM.
Also would recommend checking out ColeMurray/background-agents if you're planning to self host. Very good alternative! And the team behind it are great
You can do either. If you don't want to migrate over fully, I'd recommend setting up an automation to fix Sentry/PostHog issues as they come in. You can get a good feel for the platform and how it fits into your workflows that way.
We also have an MCP server that you can use to delegate tasks (e.g. research, debugging, SRE work) to Hoplite via your existing local setup.
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)
At the moment we're using Daytona as a redundant fallback in case Modal experiences an outage, but they have very stringent limits on how many resources we can consume concurrently. We're evaluating adding a second provider to help ease this so would love a chat! Feel free to email bence [at] hoplite.sh
Suggestion: 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.
Almost every possible name that is not a portmanteau, made-up word, or combination of N words has a naming "conflict". This is not an interesting thing to say and I wish that people would stop saying this on everything anyone ever posts on HN. It almost feels like it should be against HN rules to point out that something else shares the same name with no additional statements.
For one, it's interesting to me because I've already known Hoplite for years as nothing to do with AI. For two, I'm not sure how sharing that is so egregious it should be against the rules? Is there an interpretation I'm missing of my original comment? Does pointing out another Hoplite get interpreted as disparaging or accusatory in some way? Does it go against intellectual curiosity?
The term "conflict" implies "there is a problem here". I would say it's very lightly disparaging, because it implies the author didn't even do basic research on other things that are also named the thing they decided to call it.
I actually checked HN rules and just saw this:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
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
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.
Are you offering browser access to the agents in your setup?
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.
Noted the pricing feedback! We're still figuring out exactly what works best so it's still very much so subject to change.
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.
Our pricing is higher than other providers because we do not upcharge on token or sandbox costs. We believe that people should be running as many agents as they possibly can handle, and an upcharge would create a monetary incentive for us to say that, when it's a genuine belief we hold.
We also offer features out of the box that would usually be behind enterprise gating (e.g. sandbox baking).
Best of luck to you!
My main issue with Modal is that their autoscaling is not as good as Daytona's. You have to stop the machine, resize, then start it, which takes ~3s and terminates all running processes. Daytona supports scaling up (but not down) without stopping the VM.
Also would recommend checking out ColeMurray/background-agents if you're planning to self host. Very good alternative! And the team behind it are great
We also have an MCP server that you can use to delegate tasks (e.g. research, debugging, SRE work) to Hoplite via your existing local setup.
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)
As the repo says no longer maintained
I actually checked HN rules and just saw this:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
So, there you go, I guess.