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Posted by BenceRed 5 hours ago

Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents(hoplite.sh)
Hi HN, we’re Bence and Ryan, founders of Hoplite (https://hoplite.sh). Hoplite lets you deploy coding agents in the cloud, with a suite of tools that makes it incredibly easy to QA features. During onboarding, we port over your local setup - sessions, memories, MCP servers, and get your projects ready to run in the cloud.

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!

30 points | 42 commentspage 2
abtinf 2 hours ago|
Why would I use this over exe.dev?
BenceRed 2 hours ago|
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)

mkagenius 4 hours ago||
If you ever need to switch sandboxes, would be happy to chat.
BenceRed 4 hours ago|
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
fsuts 3 hours ago||
This Daytona? https://github.com/daytonaio/daytona

As the repo says no longer maintained

BenceRed 3 hours ago||
This one: https://www.daytona.io. Their platform was OSS for a long time but they decided to go closed source recently.
LoganDark 5 hours ago||
Naming conflict with https://www.hoplite.gg
BenceRed 4 hours ago||
Yeah, luckily they're in quite a different domain to us -- hopefully shouldn't have too much trouble winning the SEO battle
LoganDark 4 hours ago|||
I don't imagine they get too many Google searches anyway, but they are incredibly popular in competitive Minecraft spheres.
rirze 3 hours ago|||
Good luck, `hoplite` triggers a ton of Minecraft media for me and that name has been around 10 years.
rytill 4 hours ago||
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.
LoganDark 4 hours ago||
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?
rytill 3 hours ago||
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.

So, there you go, I guess.

docheinestages 4 hours ago||
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.
BenceRed 4 hours ago|
Agreed 100%. We've been working with a designer on a complete redesign of our landing page to avoid that vibey-smell.
nzjrs 2 hours ago||
Your website text reads like Claude slop
BenceRed 2 hours ago|
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.
abratabia 4 hours ago|
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