{"id":99287,"title":"Replicas - End-to-End Background Coding Agents","tagline":"Background coding agents for engineering teams","body":"Hi there, I'm Connor from [Replicas](https://replicas.dev/) :)\n\nRecently, you might have seen Stripe and Ramp release blogs outlining their in-house background coding agents. This showed us that background agents, with the proper tooling, can be relied on to ship critical production code.\n\nReplicas is a background coding agent that can run your codebase locally.\n\nWe’re used by 20+ YC startups at all team sizes.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99287\u0026key=user_uploads/1688990/b35f4253-6fd0-478b-a04f-26f73a18b625)\n\n**The Problem**\n\nBackground coding agents are a huge productivity boost for clearing tickets and shipping faster.\n\nThe existing solutions - CC/Codex on Cloud, Cursor Agents - lock you into one harness and give you **no control over the environment**.\n\nThis defeats the entire point of \"background\" agents. A powerful background agent should run everything locally, verify its work, and iterate until it's satisfied.\n\n**How Replicas Works**\n\n**Replicas** helps you delegate to as many background agents as you need:\n\n\\- Bring your own Claude/Codex credentials\n\n\\- Each agent gets a sandbox VM with your code cloned\n\n\\- The agent installs deps, spins up databases, runs services, and verifies its work locally\n\n\\- When it's done, it opens a PR for you to review\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99287\u0026key=user_uploads/1688990/e20b6968-523d-4376-a05c-ba175cc61611)\n\nReplicas can be triggered from Slack, Linear, GitHub (PR reviews, CI/CD failures), the Dashboard, or API.\n\nThe biggest difference is **Environments**. You can configure the following:\n\n\\- Files\n\n\\- Env vars\n\n\\- Start hooks\n\n\\- Warm hooks\n\n\\- Skills/MCPs\n\nIt's built so that its flexible to any kind of codebase, allowing Replicas to run everything locally just like a human engineer would.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99287\u0026key=user_uploads/1688990/df185d7b-b90e-455f-9ff7-10dcefcfd8c7)\n\nReplicas can also create **Previews**:\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99287\u0026key=user_uploads/1688990/7be01ba9-b653-43f2-975d-234002802e15)\n\nMeaning you can check out services (e.g web app on `3000`) running on the sandbox's VM from your computer with just a click :)\n\nCheck out this writeup for Replicas V1 for more details:\n\n\u003chttps://www.replicas.dev/notes/replicas-v1\u003e\n\n**Demo Video**\n\n\u003chttps://youtube.com/watch?v=uyH77T-pcXc\u003e\n\n**What's Next**\n\n\\- **Automations + API**: Improving our API and adding an automations menu, e.g having Replicas run every night.\n\n\\- **Recursive**: Replicas can break down super complex tasks by creating more Replicas instances.\n\n\\- **Lowering Latency**: For larger teams, improving our warm pool and snapshotting infrastructure to make spinning up Replicas feel _instant_ (more than it already does)\n\n\\- **Long-term Memory**\n\n\\- and what our customers ask for :p\n\n**What I'm asking from you**\n\n\\- Sign up (\u003chttps://replicas.dev\u003e) or reach out ([connor@replicas.dev](mailto:connor@replicas.dev))\n\n\\- Check out \\[this writeup\\](\u003chttps://www.replicas.dev/notes/replicas-v1\u003e) for Replicas V1\n\n\\- Upvote if this resonates with you!","slug":"PpP-replicas-end-to-end-background-coding-agents","created_at":"2026-04-01T17:38:42.126Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:54:04.553Z","total_vote_count":85,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/PpP-replicas-end-to-end-background-coding-agents","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=99287\u0026key=user_uploads/1688990/b35f4253-6fd0-478b-a04f-26f73a18b625","company":{"id":31345,"name":"Replicas","slug":"replicas","url":"https://replicas.dev","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/42200c6faa28ad1e57b9f2675695026205379dbf.png","batch":"Spring 2026","industry":"B2B","tags":["Artificial Intelligence","Developer Tools","API"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/31345"}}