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

81 points by BenceRed 2mo ago

Hi HN, we’re Bence and Ryan, founders of Hoplite (https://hoplite.sh 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 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 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!

kunalganglani 1mo ago
The cloud coding agent space is heating up, but most offerings still feel half-baked or overpriced for what you get. Anything that just slaps a UI on top of an expensive hosted model without real flexibility is doomed to be a niche tool, not mainstream developer infrastructure. The winners emerging now are those that blend cloud convenience with local model support or open-source backends—letting you decide when to offload or keep control. If Hoplite nails effortless onboarding that portably moves your local setup to cloud agents, and actually makes large-scale concurrent testing painless, it could carve out serious traction. But the people already pushing multiple agents in production know determinism and cost predictability beat flashy demos every time. So credibility will swing on whether they deliver rock-solid integrations and if the pricing scales reasonably for teams who want hundreds or thousands of automated runs—not just “look what AI can do” prototypes. Short version: If you want a toy, grab Copilot Cloud. If you want a coding agent platform that scales and behaves like real engineering infrastructure, watch for Hoplite’s ability to play nice with open-source models or let you own where compute and memory live. Otherwise it’s just another cloud hype play.
- focxle 1mo ago
  The cost predictability problem is real and it comes from a single mechanical fact: you cannot know what an LLM call costs before you make it, because the token count only comes back with the response. Vendor dashboards, per-key limits, and budget alerts all arrive after the money is spent. A proxy in front of your agents sees the same response you do, so it cannot refuse a call based on predicted cost either. The only place that can enforce a ceiling before the next call goes out is inside the agent process itself, where you already know what the last call cost and can accumulate a running total. That is what focxle does. It wraps the SDKs you already use, attributes spend to named agents across every vendor, prints a console report that shows the projected monthly at the current run rate, and enforces per-call and daily caps in enforce mode. Free observe mode never blocks anything and needs no account. ```python pip install focxle import focxle focxle.init() ``` I work on focxle, so weigh that as you like.
mellosouls 2mo ago
Firstly: good luck! 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.

81 points by BenceRed 2mo ago

kunalganglani 1mo ago

The cloud coding agent space is heating up, but most offerings still feel half-baked or overpriced for what you get. Anything that just slaps a UI on top of an expensive hosted model without real flexibility is doomed to be a niche tool, not mainstream developer infrastructure. The winners emerging now are those that blend cloud convenience with local model support or open-source backends—letting you decide when to offload or keep control. If Hoplite nails effortless onboarding that portably moves your local setup to cloud agents, and actually makes large-scale concurrent testing painless, it could carve out serious traction. But the people already pushing multiple agents in production know determinism and cost predictability beat flashy demos every time. So credibility will swing on whether they deliver rock-solid integrations and if the pricing scales reasonably for teams who want hundreds or thousands of automated runs—not just “look what AI can do” prototypes. Short version: If you want a toy, grab Copilot Cloud. If you want a coding agent platform that scales and behaves like real engineering infrastructure, watch for Hoplite’s ability to play nice with open-source models or let you own where compute and memory live. Otherwise it’s just another cloud hype play.

focxle 1mo ago
The cost predictability problem is real and it comes from a single mechanical fact: you cannot know what an LLM call costs before you make it, because the token count only comes back with the response. Vendor dashboards, per-key limits, and budget alerts all arrive after the money is spent. A proxy in front of your agents sees the same response you do, so it cannot refuse a call based on predicted cost either. The only place that can enforce a ceiling before the next call goes out is inside the agent process itself, where you already know what the last call cost and can accumulate a running total. That is what focxle does. It wraps the SDKs you already use, attributes spend to named agents across every vendor, prints a console report that shows the projected monthly at the current run rate, and enforces per-call and daily caps in enforce mode. Free observe mode never blocks anything and needs no account. ```python pip install focxle import focxle focxle.init() ``` I work on focxle, so weigh that as you like.

mellosouls 2mo ago

Firstly: good luck! 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.