Runtime (YC P26) – Sandboxed coding agents for everyone on a team
Hey HN, We're Gus and Carlos from Runtime (https://runtm.com). We're building infra that lets your whole team (including non-engineers) ship with Claude Code, Codex, and other agents without engineering having to handhold every session.After Mentum (YC S21) was acquired, I personally shipped 4 full-stack products in 3 months using coding agents. When I tried to roll the same workflow out to the rest of the team, it fell apart: Most PRs were unmergeable slop - Every repo required an engineer doing one-off local setup. - Skills and context lived in one person's head. - There was no safe way for a PM to touch a real codebase without risking a bad deploy or a secrets leak.Carlos comes from building agentic reconciliation systems at Modern Treasury and had a similar experience when letting his support team use devin.We ended up building internal background agent infra but it quickly became a nightmare to mantain and develop. We built Runtime so you don't have to do this kind of thing.Runtime work like as follows. Engineering defines the context once: system instructions, skills, and scoped integrations installable via CLI, mise, npm, or any package manager. Then Runtime snapshots your full running environment including multi-service Docker Compose setups, Kafka, Redis, seeded DBs, so it comes up in milliseconds with every server already running.We orchestrate across sandbox providers like E2B, Daytona, EC2 or self-hosted K8s depending on your setup. Secrets are injected through our managed proxy so they never touch the agent directly, and guardrails run at the infrastructure level: command allow/deny lists, network egress controls, and RBAC scoped per human and per agent. Every session also gets a shareable preview URL, so internal builds go from sandbox to the rest of the team without needing production access.Runtime works with whichever agent your team already uses: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini, Devin. You can trigger
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
high confidence
Competition
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Trend
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Infrastructure layer that democratizes AI coding agents by solving the operational complexity of safely deploying them across non-technical teams.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Founders have direct experience shipping with agents AND scaling to teams (credibility)
- Solves a real, acute pain point that will only grow as agent adoption accelerates
- Agent-agnostic approach future-proofs against model/tool churn
- Infrastructure-level security is defensible and hard to replicate
- Clear monetization path (usage-based pricing on compute + premium features)
- YC pedigree + relevant prior exits (Mentum acquisition) + domain expertise (Modern Treasury)
- Timing is perfect, Claude Code, Cursor, Devin all launching now; enterprises need this
- Shareable preview URLs solve a real collaboration gap
Risks
- Sandbox provider dependency, if E2B/Daytona have outages, Runtime fails; need multi-provider resilience
- Competitive threat from: (1) sandbox providers adding agent features natively, (2) agent platforms (Devin, Cursor) building team features, (3) cloud providers (AWS, GCP) bundling this
- Adoption friction, requires engineering to define context/skills upfront; lazy teams won't do this
- Security is table-stakes; one breach destroys credibility; needs SOC 2, regular audits, bug bounty
- Market timing risk: if agent code quality doesn't improve, demand for 'safe agent deployment' stays niche
- Sales complexity, needs to land with both engineering (infrastructure buy-in) and non-engineers (end users); dual champion problem
- Unclear if this is a $100M business or a $20M acquihire target for a larger platform
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
AI
Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
AI
Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
AI
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