I have a dev box with 96 GB of RAM, 2x4 TB NVMe drives, and an unbelievably beefy AMD CPU. This box costs me less than $150 per month and is so hyperlocal that I can log into it and use it as a remote desktop, while also using it as an always-on server that I can use to run T3 code and tmux and so forth. I can then connect to it from my laptop or my phone using Tailscale and prompt using the T3 Code or Remux mobile apps. Voilà — I have my own outsourced development center.
In this setup, my agent can handle everything: previews with a NixOS environment, unlimited threading, “autofixing” (which is just a loop between my agent and Copilot review comments), etc.
But it requires a LOT of custom setup/tooling so that my local environment works with my agent.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I've tried a number of serverless or ephemeral VM-type solutions, and it turns out that once you're working on "real code," you can't use ephemeral micro VMs reliably because your code starts interacting with too many different dependent services. You have to run migrations, so that your tests run properly, and to do that, you need to pull five different Docker images, and it goes on indefinitely. Eventually, the overhead of making little micro VMs is so high that it makes much more sense to take a monolithic approach to development and have a persistent workstation. You can still use things like worktrees, which allow you to massively parallelize your work, but you're building off of a shared local drive and cache.
So I believe there's a place for something like Hoplite with simpler software, but the problem is that the minute you get beyond toy software, it becomes really hard to test, scale, and deploy everything in micro VMs. There are also other companies that have tried this approach (like https://shipyard.build, although I think they had a slightly different philosophy from what you're doing) and I don't know that they've been massively successful.
What is it that you're doing differently that will allow Hoplite to succeed? How do you think that you'll compete against the legacy players in this space and the more full-spectrum players like Devin, et al.?