Announcing Automations

For a few months we watched what people actually type into Hoplite, and a pattern kept showing up in our own workspace too: the same prompts, retyped on a rhythm. Bump the dependencies and run the full suite. Find tests that flaked this week and fix the top one. Sweep the codebase for TODOs with dates on them and deal with the expired ones. Someone remembered to ask every Monday, which means someone was working as a cron daemon with better judgment.

So we made the rhythm part of the product. An automation is a prompt plus a schedule. You write the instruction once, the way you'd brief a teammate, and pick how often it runs: hourly, nightly, every Monday at nine, whatever the work calls for.

A scheduled run is a full run

We were firm about this internally: no diminished mode for scheduled work. Each run opens a real Hoplite thread in its own isolated cloud sandbox, with your repository cloned and your project's setup applied. It can run your tests, boot your dev server, and use whatever integrations your workspace has connected. And it leaves the same paper trail as interactive work, a full transcript plus a pull request at the end.

The pull request part is not negotiable, by the way. Automations propose; they never merge. We think the whole idea of standing agent work collapses without that line, because the first bad unreviewed merge at 3am is the last time anyone trusts the system.

What people schedule

From the first weeks of internal use and early access, the winners have been the chores everyone agrees should happen and nobody wants to own:

• Dependency bumps that arrive as tested pull requests instead of a dashboard full of red badges
• A nightly pass over the test suite that finds flakes and attaches fixes
• Codebase hygiene: dead exports, stale feature flags, expired TODOs
• Checks against external systems on a beat, like an error tracker or an issue queue

One team runs a Friday automation that just writes up what changed in the codebase that week, for the Monday standup. We didn't design for that. That's the kind of use you only get by shipping the general thing.

Available now

Automations are live today on every plan, including the free one. They live in the Automations tab, and the first one takes about a minute to set up. Scale plans can schedule down to the minute; everyone else gets five-minute granularity, which in practice is more than tight enough for chores.